Was it too abrupt? Anastasia wonders. She had known that her fun would be coming to an end sooner or later. As soon as she had seen online that Adam Pelley was going to be in Duluth, she suddenly understood the path she was meant to take, what her true mission was, what her endgame should be. Finding out about London’s grandmother was a happy accident that just happened to have an immediate applicable use. There was no point in continuing – why expend energy on a project that had already produced better results than you had originally hoped for? But now she can’t help thinking that she may have been too hasty, and in her impatience to move on actually done herself a disservice. London, for all her faults, is a smart girl, and has developed a shrewdness since her arrest that Anastasia would never have imagined. Had she figured it out?

No. That’s crazy. Just because Adam Pelley had stopped communicating with London after she sent him the video did not mean that London had assumed he had stopped communicating with her forever. She is on her way down there to meet him, everything has played out according to plan. So why does Anastasia have this nagging feeling in the back of her mind that something has gone wrong?

She decides to forget about it. What’s done is done, she thinks. She closes her laptop and goes to the fridge, pulling out four cans of coconut water. Then she pops them open and dumps out half of each, topping them off with the last of a bottle of Grey Goose. It’s important, in this heat, to stay hydrated. She takes a sip of her drink and makes a face. Too much coconut water. She finishes it off, then, rummaging through a bag on the counter, she finds another bottle and opens it up. The bottle, like everything else in the bag, was something she and Andy had stolen from the mall that morning. It’s easy to steal when you’re well dressed, clever, and confident. Everyone else just assumes that they are the ones who have made the mistake.