“Where exactly do you want us to go?” I asked again.

The detective gave me a reassuring smile, but I wasn’t buying it. “We have a safe house, we can put him up, all of you up, there.”

Michael sat with his arms crossed, the way he had since I’d been allowed back into the interview room. “I don’t want Kacy or Grace involved.”

“I don’t want to be away from you,” I said, but he didn’t even look at me, keeping his gaze on the detective. I could see the same tension in his jaw and shoulders that he’d had on the worst parts of our drive from New Jersey, when a phalanx of trucks enclosed us. He was focused on the road ahead now, just trying to get us through safely.

Alondra asked me, “Is there a place you could go where Lena wouldn’t know to find you?”

In the back of my mind, I’d been thinking about this, going over and over the things found in Lena’s abandoned car. Her phone, her wallet, and the last thing, just a piece of trash to the detective but everything to me. Lena didn’t leave trash in her car, and she didn’t make mistakes. She’d sent me one message: Working on another surprise for you. Was the torn postcard some other communication I was supposed to understand?

It wouldn’t be hard to find my parents; my maiden name was out there on the internet. But my younger sister was subletting a basement apartment not too far from their house. Molly’s name wasn’t on the lease or the utilities, and she’d been on tour with her band for the last month. Her landlord lived upstairs, but supposedly he was out of town almost every weekend. Nobody would know we were even there. I’d be close enough that my parents could watch Grace, which I knew they’d love to do, as long as I could convince them to keep their visits to the sure-to-be-crappy apartment rather than bringing us back to their house.

Would I be going exactly where Lena wanted me to go? Because this was it, the moment when I could make a choice to get answers, save a friend, or catch a killer. That torn postcard might be a clue, a winking invitation. Of course, it could also be nothing at all.