The only terms I’m operating under.
I find the Harrow place. Doris is, indeed, a reasonable woman. The room is small and clean and smells like pine and old paper. There’s a window that looks out over a back garden going gently wild at the edges.
I drop my bag on the floor.
I sit on the bed.
I am going to figure out what Amber did and how she did it and I am going to dismantle it, piece by piece, until my name is clean and hers is the one in the papers where it belongs.
Just…
Not tonight.
Tonight I’m in Sweetwater Valley. Temporarily. Strategically. On my own terms.
And whatever this town is—whatever it’s doing to the air, to the back of my neck, to that low hum behind my sternum—I’m not runningfrom it.
I’m not.
I’m not running from anything anymore.
Do you hear me, universe? I’m done running.
Done.
Chapter 2
Lola
The bathroom light in Doris Harrow’s spare room is the honest kind. No flattering warmth, no forgiving softness, just a single overhead bulb that shows you exactly what you are. Which is what I need right now, because what I need right now is accurate information.
I look at myself in the mirror.
Dark hair, mid length, the way it falls that is recognizable because it’s mine and has been mine for the better part of twenty-four years. The line of my jaw. The arrangement of my features that has been on three news cycles in the last seventy-two hours, that has been photographed from security camera angles and distributed in a format that means people are looking for it.
My face.
The problem is my face.
I look at it for a long moment and then I open my bag on the floor of the bathroom. I find what I need.
The kit is basic.
I put it together at a pharmacy two states back, standing in the hair color aisle for approximately three minutes making calculations about what changes the most and costs the least in terms of maintenance and visibility. It’s not a full disguise. Full disguises are for people with resources and time, and I have limited quantities of both. It’s ashift. A significant-enough shift that the glance-recognition fails, the identification that happens in the first second of seeing someone in a crowd.
First second recognition runs on: hair color, hair length, and silhouette.
I can control two of those.
The box sayswarm auburnwhich is a marketing description forred, but we know you’re nervous about red.I’m not nervous about red. I open the box.
The process is not glamorous.
I’ve done this before. The fast practical change in a bathroom that isn’t mine. You learn what you need to learn, over a life like mine, and what I’ve learned is: gloves first, always, because the stain is the part that betrays you. Amateur dye jobs announce themselves on the hands. I put the gloves on and I work efficiently. Soon, the bathroom smells like chemicals.
While I wait for the color to set, I sit on the edge ofthe tub and I look at the wall. I think about Amber. Not the locked box version. The real version.
Fifteen years. I have fifteen years of the woman who framed me. Amber at nine, stealing cafeteria pudding and distributing it to the table like it was a public service. Amber at sixteen, talking me out of a bad decision with the logic of someone who understood exactly what I was going to regret. Amber at twenty-one, in a terrible apartment we split because neither of us could afford anything better, arguing about whose turn it was to buy dish soap.
