Dea stared. “What . . . what do you mean?” she said. “If nobody sent you, why are you here?”

Briggs and Connelly exchanged another look. Dea hated it when adults did that, as if she couldn’t see that they were telegraphing some secret message. She was extremely aware of the clocks ticking in the quiet—seconds, minutes running by. Shouldn’t they be looking for clues, or organizing search parties or something?

“I’ll call it in,” Connelly said in a low voice—again, as if Dea wouldn’t hear, even though she was standing less than four feet away. He unclipped a police radio and stepped outside again, closing the door behind him. Dea felt a little better. At least he was doing something.

“Okay, Odea,” Briggs said, forced-cheerful, over-loud. “Can we sit down and chat for a minute?”

“Shouldn’t you be looking for my mom?” Dea blurted out.

“If we’re going to find your mom, I’ll need to ask you a few questions,” he said, in an I-know-best kind of voice. Dea could tell he was trying hard to be nice, probably so she wouldn’t freak out. She tried to imagine him taking a guitar to Will’s head and couldn’t. She tried to find a resemblance to Connor and couldn’t do that, either.

“All right,” she said. She gestured to the living room. Toby jumped off the couch and darted under an armchair. No one had ever been inside the house except for Dea and her mom. Briggs eased himself down onto the sofa, trying to seem casual, smiling like this was a social visit. But Dea wasn’t fooled. She watched his eyes tick over the whole room, taking in everything—the clocks, the bare mantelpiece where the photograph of Dea’s fake dad had been, the mishmash of furniture from different eras.

Dea didn’t feel like sitting down but Officer Briggs looked as though he expected her to, so she did, trying to control the buzzing anxiety crawling through her legs and arms, like a thousand insects.

“All right, let’s start at the beginning,” Briggs said. “When’s the last time you saw your mother?”

“Yesterday.” Dea looked down at her hands. “We had a fight.” She felt the urge to cry and took a deep breath, willing herself to stay calm. She wasn’t going to have a breakdown in front of a stranger.

“Did your mom seem . . . different at all to you? Jumpy? Nervous about something?”

Dea shook her head. “No.” Then she corrected: “She . . . she wanted to move again. That’s what the fight was about. I told her I wouldn’t.” If Dea hadn’t been so stubborn—if she’d agreed to pack up and go, like her mother wanted—her mom might still be home, and okay. It was all her fault.

Briggs was jotting down notes. For a long minute, they sat in silence. Dea felt every second that passed in her chest and teeth and stomach. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “We shouldn’t be sitting here,” she said. “We should be out looking. She could be hurt. She could be in danger. Why are we just sitting here?”

Briggs put away his notebook. “Let’s stay calm, okay?”

But Dea couldn’t stay calm. Fear and frustration clawed up her chest. Her fault. “She could be dead. You’re supposed to be helping. You’re supposed to be finding her.”

The front door slammed again, and Dea jumped. Connelly reappeared, shaking more rain onto the carpet. He didn’t look at Dea, just spoke directly to Briggs. “Okay,” he said. “The troopers will keep an eye out at toll points.” His eyes clicked to Dea. “Does your mom have a different vehicle, other than the one parked outside?”

“No,” Dea said. They were acting like her mom had just picked up and left. She dug her nails into the flesh of her hands and pressed, wishing that, like a dream, she could just find a way out.

“Okay, good, good.” Connelly was nodding. “What about some place she likes to go? Like a country house? A little hideaway?”

“Hideaway?” Dea looked from Connelly to Briggs and back. “Are you . . . is this a joke? My mom didn’t go anywhere. She didn’t leave me. Something happened. Don’t you get that?”

“Odea”—Briggs leaned forward, putting his hands on his elbows—“I know this must be hard for you. But your mom is in a lot of trouble. That’s why we came here today. Not to find her. To arrest her.”

Silence. Ticking silence. Dea counted her heartbeats. One, two, three. Pause. Fourfivesix. “What . . . what are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry you have to learn about it this way,” Briggs said. He really did sound sorry. She wondered if he’d told Connor he was sorry, after Connor’s mom’s head was splattered halfway across the bedroom. “Your mother’s a smart woman. I’m sure you know that. There’ve been a dozen fraud investigations against her in as many years. Arizona, Florida, Illinois. Identity theft, security fraud, some petty thieving. Agent Connelly’s department reached out to me after she got up to her old tricks here in Fielding.”

“What do you mean, Agent Connelly’s department?” Dea said. Her voice sounded distant, foreign, like it was being piped back to her through a cave. She turned to Connelly. “You’re not a cop?”

Connelly shook his head. “I’m with the Feds,” he said simply.

Dea closed her eyes. Opened them again. But the two men were still there—both of them watching her with twin expressions of pity.

“She’s always skipped town before we could make anything stick,” Connelly said. Dea hated the way he said she, avoiding Miriam’s name, as if she wasn’t a real person. “Looks like she’s done it again.” He was still standing, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. Still dripping on the carpet.

Dea’s thoughts were disjointed. She was seeing everything in short flashes, as if the reel in her brain kept getting cut.

Connelly’s boots were crusted with mud. Her mom would be mad about that—about the mud. Then she remembered her mom was gone.

“You’re wrong,” Dea managed to say. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

But even as she said it, she remembered all the times her mother had woken her in the grayness of a new dawn, whispering “It’s time to go, Dea”; packing up the car before the sun wrestled free of the horizon; long hours, towns melting blurrily by the windows, her mother silent, anxious. And the other stuff: fake names, jobs that never went anywhere, money that came from nowhere, money stuffed in cardboard shoeboxes and hidden in the dashboard.

She wondered if the cops knew about the money.

“It took us a long time to pin anything on her,” Connelly said. “But this time we’re sure.”

“I’m sorry,” Briggs said again, as if that helped. As if it mattered.

Dea thought of the brochures spread across the kitchen table, and the urgent way her mom had woken her the day before. We’re leaving. She must have known the police were closing in. Dea’s mouth tasted like bile. Her thoughts ricocheted back and forth between anger and denial. It wasn’t possible. It made sense. She wouldn’t have. She must have.

All these years, when Miriam had filled Dea’s head with stories about monsters and mirrors and locks on the door, she was just full of shit. She was running from the law, plain and simple.

And yet . . .

The mirrors had shattered upstairs. Small, scrappy evidence, but something. And her mom couldn’t have gone far without a car, unless she’d ditched it in favor of the bus. But even if what the cops said was true—her mom had been stealing, using identities that weren’t hers—Dea couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe that Miriam would have left Dea behind.

Dea pictured her mother turning to her, winking, as they barreled down another nameless highway. Thick as thieves.

“I know this is asking a lot,” Briggs was saying, in a soothing voice, like he was trying to coax Dea back onto a bike after she’d fallen down. Dea wondered whether Connelly was supposed to be the bad cop. Or the bad Fed. Or whatever. Neither of them looked the part. Both of them looked like tired dads. She still hated them. “But if there’s anything you can think of at all that might help us find your mom—any detail, anything she mentioned in the past few days—any place she particularly likes to go . . . ?”