My long night begins with a quick check on the three sleeping bodies tucked up on an air mattress in Sharon Ray’s living room. It ends with me collapsing face-first on the empty space beside Sonia. The last thing I feel before sleep hits is her tiny chest rising and falling under my arm. The last thing I hear is Poe, in the Rays’ kitchen, laying out the plans for my escape.

Chapter Seventy-seven

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Here is how it happens on this last day.

Patrick kisses us goodbye—first the twins, then Sonia, then me, and finally Steven. He pays extra attention to Steven. You never forget your firstborn, I guess. You don’t love them more, but the bond is different, primal. As he drives away with the single vial hidden in his briefcase, I’m glad we don’t have a dog anymore. We did once, a silly mix of collie and beagle and shepherd that sat morosely on the doormat from the moment Patrick left in the morning until he came home at sunset. I don’t think I could bear watching that dog wait.

It’s bad enough for me.

Everything after his car disappears, taillights glowing in the predawn, is a construct, a video I play while the kids fight over the last brownie Sharon puts out, while Sonia tells her brothers in no uncertain terms that she knows they’re trying to cheat at cards, while Patrick’s half-empty coffee mug sits on a stranger’s kitchen counter, the liquid in it evaporating and condensing into a thick brown sludge. It still smells like shit, this American coffee, but I savor it all the same.

“Just going to lie down for a minute,” I tell Sharon, who’s making breakfast for a dozen hungry people. She waves me off with an all-too-somber understanding, telling me to use her room if I like. I retreat with the rest of my coffee to an unfamiliar place with still-drawn blinds and a ceiling fan humming a monotonous lullaby.

I see Patrick slowing and stopping at the security gate, holding out his identification card to the Secret Service agent, a man who wears a white squiggle in his ear instead of an embroidered SS patch on his arm. He parks, and I think he looks at the sky, maybe toward that patch in the east where the sun presses through the darkness.

The meeting is held over breakfast, but to Patrick it must feel like the Last Supper, and he’s the Judas in the crowd, passing a poisoned cup.

That was the plan, to put it in the water. Or the coffee. Or the champagne that will be popped open and poured out into delicate crystal flutes for twelve distinguished guests to sip while they congratulate one another.