Then she added, “But I’ll think about it. We’re not taking any risks. Don’t worry about us, Kacy. You stay safe.”

Across the street where the man was raking leaves, a white-haired woman in a shawl-collared sweater came to the door. He looked up and gestured—a few more minutes. Maybe I had been hallucinating danger here as a reaction to all the months I’d been living in blissful ignorance under surveillance by killers. “Promise me you’ll be careful,” I said.

“You promise me the same thing.”

“Deal.” We hung up.

My breath was coming quickly again, and the cool calm I usually absorbed from Elizabeth was gone. A mail truck came down the street, and when the driver reached through her window to stuff mail into a neighbor’s box, the black-and-white shepherd became frantic, barking and leaping inside its fence.

Why wasn’t Lena just disappearing? She shouldn’t be sending postcards; she should just have driven over the border and lived her life. When she and Brady killed together, it was violent and bloody and gruesome. But on her own …

No one would ever know a murder had happened. Maybe a year would go by, maybe two. One day Elizabeth would put Theo down for a nap, go into her kitchen for a mug of tea, and something would hit her on the back of the head. She’d bleed out on the creamy tile floor of her kitchen, her blond hair matted and stained, unable to rise when she heard Theo crying. “Did you hear?” the neighbors would say. “What a tragic accident.” And the Bluebonnets would drop off meals and Wyatt would raise Theo alone or maybe move back to Canada and Elizabeth would be gone. I’d always know she was a terrible footnote in Lena’s story, and that she might have been safe if she hadn’t been friends with me.

Aimee wasn’t in danger. Elizabeth was, and so were those mysterious “others” who had received postcards. Maybe Rahmia or Rachael or Inés or even Alondra. Just like Sandy, they might be gone in an instant, and I was helpless to protect them.

And the person I most longed for was also in Texas, and also in danger. Voice messages weren’t enough, texts weren’t enough, even a phone call wasn’t enough. What I needed was Michael’s embrace, pulling me close, a wordless promise that we would be okay even if the world burned down around us. Holding on to each other was all we’d ever had, from the moment we’d met to our first tiny apartment and the long drive across the country.

But the call went straight to voice mail. So did my next call to Alondra. No contact with him, no answers from her.