The door opened and the girls said “Amen” at the same time; Summer had to fight to hide her smile.

  “Thank you for your help today,” Summer said, speaking formally for Ama’s benefit. She squeezed her friend’s hand three times: I...love...you. Sara squeezed back three times and then Ama and her daughter were gone. It felt terrible, the loss and loneliness. All she could do now was wait.

  18

  Now

  Mackenzie was taking the first flight out the next morning to Arizona to see her parents. The rest of them were supposed to land at SeaTac together on the midday flight. Rainy was staring at the ceiling of Charlie’s Inn at five a.m., composing her text. She’d send it to their group chat so she could deal with them all at once. She heard the rolling of suitcase wheels outside her room; someone was leaving early. She hadn’t been able to sleep, the events of the previous day playing out over and over in her mind till she felt loopy from them, and now she had a headache. At midnight she’d left her room and walked. There was a place she wanted to see, and she needed the darkness to see it, lest she be noticed.

  Once Rainy had sent the text, she got out of bed. Grabbing a hair tie off the nightstand, she braided her hair. Everything that had happened with the Tiger Mountain group made her feel sick now. It was too much—being in Friendship and thinking about the things her supposed friends had said. Like a tornado and a hurricane in one heart, Rainy thought.

  Ursa had let it slip that Braithe had called Grant “boo.” Had they been together at some point? Why hadn’t Grant told her? In the bathroom she turned on the shower, studying her reflection in the mirror. Grant encouraged her friendship with Braithe, which seemed like a strange thing to do if he’d been with her in that way. And why when people said “it was nothing” did that always mean it was something? That was an unspoken rule.

  After her shower, Rainy put on yesterday’s clothes and headed to Red’s for aspirin and some toiletries. Her headache was starting to make her feel fried. Red had a soda fountain along the back near the pharmacy, and she ordered a coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. She watched the few stragglers ambling about—mostly employees dressed in red vests. A man drank from a water bottle near the automatic doors, his suit sagging off his body like it was more exhausted than he was. She pulled her phone from her bag and stared at the screen. She touched cool fingertips to her eyelids, breathing in. The bagel rolled in her stomach, threatening to slide back up on a wave of cream cheese.

  Rainy finished off the rest of her coffee and tossed the cup in the trash. She urgently needed to be done with this place and to get out of there. Her headache hadn’t subsided with the caffeine and aspirin as she’d hoped.

  She checked her phone again. Only a text from the gallery in New York saying they’d sold her Jar of Parts piece to a private collector. The piece had sold for a hundred thousand dollars, an amount that was impressive and worth celebrating, yet the moment fell flat.

  When she looked at her phone again, there was a string of texts from the Tiger Mountain group.

  Ursa: What? Braithe’s not flying home with us, either. She finally got an appointment with that psychic she’s obsessed with.

  The whole psychic thing hit differently today.

  Rainy crossed Main Street, leaving Red’s behind her. So Braithe had found a reason to stay, as well. It bothered her, but she couldn’t put her finger on why.

  Mac: Let us know when you get back and stay SAFE.

  Tara still hadn’t responded to any part of the thread when Rainy tucked her phone in her back pocket, and neither had Braithe.

  She went to the Canary for breakfast, where the same kid was there, setting out sugar caddies on the tables. Derek. Marvin had said he was Taured’s kid. Taured probably had a dozen kids by now; when she lived at the compound, there had been rumors that he’d fathered some of the pregnant women’s babies—she remembered the bratty, crying kid from her very first day, Enoch Aaron—but at fifteen, looking into that hadn’t been a priority.

  She decided to sit at a table this time, and Derek came over with a menu as soon as she’d seated herself. He didn’t make eye contact when she asked for a coffee. The one from Red’s hadn’t been enough. Instead, he nodded at his shoes and scurried off. Rainy took out her phone. The group chat had ten new messages. She’d look at them later; right now, she wanted to see if she could find an Uber. It was twenty minutes away. She was the only customer, and while she sat, nursing her coffee, she realized that Taured could walk in the door at any second. What would she do? She didn’t know, but the mere idea of seeing him made every hair on her body stand at attention. Even more disturbing was the possibility that she wanted him to see her. But what was she going to do about it? She sipped her coffee and stared at the door. When Derek came by again, she asked him where he went to school.

  “I was homeschooled,” he said, looking embarrassed about it.

  “You an only child?”

  He looked startled by her question.

  “No... I have brothers and sisters. I’m...the oldest.” He said it like it was a bad thing.

  “You’re setting a great example for them by being responsible and working.” Rainy smiled, and for the first time he looked her in the eye. While she had him, she ordered eggs and toast and asked for her coffee to be topped off. When he brought the pot back, she asked how long he’d been working there.

  He was skittish, trying too hard to be careful and seemingly in perpetual terror of messing up. “Just the last two months, since I graduated. My dad owns this place, so—” His voice dropped off hopelessly.

  “He wanted you to learn the business,” she interrupted him, rolling her eyes.

  He blushed. “Something like that.” Now that she was looking at him—really looking—she could see a resemblance, and not just to Taured. The wide shoulders, the height, the neck pushed forward. Is it in your head? she asked herself.

  “Sometimes dads suck,” she said truthfully. He looked like he wanted to say something, but a voice barked his name from the kitchen and Derek’s head snapped toward it. A trucker walked in and sat at the breakfast bar, putting his hat on the counter beside him.

  “Gotta go,” he said. “Be back with your eggs in a few.”

  She left her phone next to her coffee mug when she went to the bathroom; there was a Jansport backpack resting in the little alcove where the cash register was, propped against the wall. Before she could think, she grabbed it, carrying it to the bathroom and locking the door. She set it in the sink, unzipping it and peering inside. Notebooks. She took one out and flipped through, finding a series of sketches. The kid was not half bad. His drawings were on the religious side, but she couldn’t hold that against him. His wallet was in the front pocket: Gideon Derek Browley, eighteen years old, his address the compound. Remorse washed through her with such violence she began to tremble.

  Sitting abruptly on the closed seat of the toilet, she stared at his driver’s license. Half the shock was in knowing she’d been right. If her math was correct, he’d have been born when Sara was seventeen, two years after Rainy had left. And how many underage mothers had there been in the twenty years since she’d fled from that place? And, of course, none of the children took Taured’s last name, because if he was caught, he’d go to prison for statutory rape. Stuffing the license back into the brown leather wallet, she dug further, uncovering nothing particularly interesting until her fingers closed around an envelope. It was from the art school at Hunter College, City University of New York. He’d been accepted into the graphics program. Poor kid. Taured would never let him leave...unless. Maybe he was planning to take things into his own hands. She put everything back except the notebook and, borrowing one of his charcoal pencils, she wrote him a note while sitting on the toilet lid. When she was done, she slipped the bag back into the alcove and went to eat her eggs.

  By the time Rainy was finished with her food, the breakfast bar had filled with a variety of singles and one family of four. Sara’s son. She could see Sara in the way he slouched his shoulders. He darted around the dining room, a coffeepot forever in his hand. Around eight, another server came in and Derek came over with her check, looking almost embarrassed to hand it to her. She handed him cash and he started digging around in his apron to make change, but Rainy said, “Keep it.”

  “Really?” he said. Rainy had left him an eighty-dollar tip.

  “Yeah,” she said, standing up. “I wanted to leave my town, too.” She bent down to grab her phone from the table and saw that she had texts from Grant in addition to the Tiger Mountain group.

  Instead of looking surprised, he looked relieved she’d said it. “Did you leave it?” His liquid brown eyes reminded her so much of Sara’s, the way they dipped down at their outer corners. His skin was pale like hers, too, and he had three dark moles on his cheek. Sara hated her moles, said she was going to get them burned off when she was an adult.

  “Hell, yes,” Rainy said, and he smiled. His teeth were crooked, but clean and white. The kid seemed more upbeat as he stuffed the money into his apron and nodded at the floor. She watched him in amusement, remembering her first restaurant job in New York as a hostess and then, later, a server. He could leave here and work at any restaurant; it was good money if you found the right place and got decent shifts. He could make it. When she’d first seen him, knowing he was Taured’s kid, she’d wanted him to leave, get the hell out of Dodge, and now that she saw Sara’s face when she looked at the boy, her heart ached.

  “Your mom,” Rainy said, staring into his eyes and thinking of her own. “Always let her know you’re okay.” She supposed it wasn’t such a strange thing for a woman to say to a kid; she could have been a mom herself for all he knew, making sure some other mom’s kid didn’t run off without her knowing.

  Derek seemed frozen in place. He blinked at her and then finally said, “My mom’s dead.”

  * * *

  Rainy hadn’t bitten her nails since she was nineteen and her college psych professor called her out for it in front of the class. It had been a humbling experience in not showing her tells. But as her Uber sped through the desert, she bit them till they bled. In her lap: the rescued Ziploc bag she’d dug up after burying it twenty years prior. She was purposefully not looking at it, afraid of what it might make her feel. Her jeans were brown with the dirt they were carrying; she imagined her face didn’t look any better. How had it stayed undisturbed for so long? But Rainy knew how; she’d chosen the spot for that very purpose. The locals called it Charlie Cactus: a thirty-foot saguaro cactus that Rainy agreed was impressive. She’d come here with Sara on their few trips into town for nonperishable food. It grew behind Red’s, away from the freeway and a five-minute walk up a hill. None of the adults had cared enough that they’d wanted to go see it each time they were in town, but it became a thing for the girls to walk over to visit Charlie.

  She’d buried her baggie deep beneath Charlie Cactus on one of those trips, double-wrapped in plastic bags from Red’s. Sara had kept lookout. Sara hadn’t asked what was in the bag; she’d just helped Rainy get rid of it. That meant that after she left the compound for good, Sara could have gone back for it and dug it up.

  She’d been so lost in thought thinking about Sara and her son that she’d forgotten about the texts on her phone. She read through the updates Grant had sent first. He didn’t mention anything about her staying in Vegas, which meant that the husbands were still out of the loop. She looked at the time, calculating the difference between her and Grant. It was three o’clock in the morning for him, so she’d text him when she got settled in the hotel and he had a chance to wake up for the day. There were four texts from Viola, asking what time she was getting back, detailing the snowfall the night before, and then another, sent an hour later, saying, Never mind, they told me you’re staying an extra day, party animal. In the group chat, Ursa had taken to updating their status through the check-in process like Rainy might change her mind at any minute and come after them. Braithe and Tara were strangely quiet. She decided to ask Viola if she knew anything more about Braithe staying behind. Viola sent a voice text.

  “I texted her whatsup this morning and she told me she’d stayed. She seemed to be fine. She sounded elated actually. She mentioned getting a flight early tomorrow, said she’d be back before you all had time to unpack. That was before she knew about you staying, too, and—”

  Viola’s voice cut off abruptly and Rainy frowned while she waited. When the text never came, she sent a question mark.

  A few seconds later, a shorter voice text appeared. “Sorry... I totally forgot we’re late for a doctor’s appointment. Tata is pulling the car around, talk soon.”

  Rainy sent a quick message wishing them good luck and leaned her head back against the seat.

  19

  Then

  They weren’t allowed watches, so she had no way of knowing what time it was. Dawn and Frank came to get her, and just like Sara said, they took her to Ama and Tom’s room.

  “Why do I have to stay here?”

  Dawn pretended not to hear. Sara had told her she’d have to wait at least an hour before Sara could come and free her, but the wait already felt agonizing. She pounded the door with both fists in frustration. Sara would come. She had to. It was Summer’s only chance.

  Sometime later she was sitting on the floor, head between her knees, when she heard a key in the lock. Jumping to her feet, she waited for the door to open. Five seconds...ten...nothing happened. Going to the door, Summer tested the lock; it was open. She hadn’t even heard the door being unlocked.

  The hallway was empty, but hanging on the outside of the doorknob was Sara’s favorite scrunchie. Summer slipped it onto her wrist and ran.

  What if she missed them, what if they left without her? What would happen without her mother here to protect her? Who would she belong to? The answer to that was so terrifying she ran faster. It was late—maybe midnight; everyone else was in bed. Would this be the last time she ran through these halls? If she failed at this, they would never let her see the outside again; she knew that deep in her gut, because she would never stop trying to leave and she would never do what they said. They had killed her mother, and they would kill her, too, for refusing to marry Taured. As she approached the old sign that still said Chapel with all its letters, she made a sign of the cross like her mother sometimes used to do. She could hear voices, faintly, like they were coming from outside instead of Taured’s office. But no—as she neared the door and pressed her ear to the wood, she could hear them inside. Sara’s father, Taured and three other voices she didn’t recognize: two men and a woman. They were outsiders, the timbre and tone unfamiliar to her. She placed her hand over the doorknob and blew out the contents of her lungs.

  Her forehead was touching the door as she prayed to her mother’s God, pleaded with him to help her. The god behind the door was a falsehood, a killer, and his people worshipped him out of fear. She didn’t know what life would meet her past the doors of the compound, but she wasn’t afraid of it.

  Four people were seated in chairs in front of Taured’s desk in formal clothing. They all looked up in surprise when she stepped into the room. She was wearing an ankle-length dress and she felt embarrassed to be standing in front of them barefoot, but her shoes had been taken after her mother had died. For a few terrible seconds, her vision blurred in and out, and she thought she was going to faint. She didn’t look at Taured, who she knew was sitting behind his desk, or Sara’s father, who stood slightly behind his pastor, ready to carry out instructions at a moment’s notice. She stood in front of the three men and one woman. She heard her name spoken from behind her, but she ignored it. The female police officer didn’t look happy to be there and since Summer wasn’t, either, she directed her words to her.

  “My name is Summer Downey. My mother was Lorraine Downey. My father is dead, too, and I want to go live with my grandparents, Mark and Gilda.”

  “This is the minor that you said ran away?” The female police officer stood. Her hand was on the holster at her waist.

  The man sitting next to her, a jowly, bald man, said, “Sit down, O’Connor.” O’Connor sat down. “Where have you been, young lady?”

  “They locked me away so I couldn’t speak to you,” she said.

  He turned to Taured, his little downturned mouth wriggling unhappily. “Explain this, Taured.”

  They weren’t asking her, she realized. But then he did something that straight-out shocked her. Taured looked Summer in the eyes and said, “Why don’t we let the young lady explain herself.”

  Not what she was expecting.

  She turned to the woman—O’Connor. “He killed my mother. It wasn’t an accident.”

  The toad man spoke up. “Young lady, we know it wasn’t an accident. Your mother was ill in heart and mind. She was an addict. Do you understand that?”

  “There was nothing wrong with her. She was fine. She would never take drugs. She hated what they did to my dad.” Summer stared between the three strangers, trying to understand why they were reacting the way they were. The only one who looked disturbed by what she’d just said was O’Connor. Summer looked at the third person now, a man who’d been quiet for the exchange. Seemingly unbothered by the entire ordeal, he looked at his watch.

  “We’ve tried to protect her from a lot of it,” Taured said.

  “That’s a lie! He locked her in a room and starved her—he tortured her! And not just her. He’s done it before! Ask anyone!” She was shaking now—her entire body and her voice. The quiet man looked at Taured.