My hands feel like ice. “I don’t…” My teeth begin to chatter. Mom turns on the heater and aims the vents at me.
“Katelyn, I’m so sorry.” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t even know where to start….”
The events run through my head as she speaks: Someone broke into our house. We stole a car.
“But I’m going to keep you safe.”
Someone tried to run us off the road. We stole another car.
“I need you to do exactly what I say, and I promise everything will be okay.”
“Mom, who were those people, and why were they”—the thought of the car slamming into us sends ice water trickling down my spine—“after us?” Talking makes my head pound, but I knew not asking the questions would hurt worse.
Everything I say makes her wince. “I will explain what I can, but I can’t do that while I’m driving. Right now, I need to get us somewhere safe and I need to think.” She glances at me. “Please, Katelyn.”
I want to give her that, but I can’t. “Should I be this scared?”
She’s supposed to say no. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.” She pauses for what feels like an eternity. “And I’m the person who loves you more than anyone else alive.”
My head hurts badly enough to make it difficult to think clearly. “Are we in some kind of witness relocation program?” She knew to run. She knows how to steal a car without getting caught. She’s not shaking at all anymore. “Mom? Why do you know how to do all this?”
She breaks her pattern of checking the mirrors to look at me. “No, we’re not in witness protection. I made a mistake when I was younger, and I had to learn.”
Imake the mistake of turning in my seat to check the road behind us, and my head makes it feel like the car is spinning around me. It takes a full minute of focused breathing before I can speak again. “A mistake? What kind of mistake?”
“The kind I can’t run from anymore.”
Several hours later, I’m not even sure what state we’re in when Mom pulls into a roadside motel with a forest of birch trees behind it. The building is nondescript, save for the flashing neon sign of a girl diving into a pool, and it’s remote enough to be unsettling without the circumstances that led us there. The closest sign of civilization is a tiny strip mall we passed a mile back, whose highlights included a pawnshop, a secondhand clothing store, and a gas station with only one working pump. Mom smooths her hair and checks her lipstick in the rearview mirror before climbing out and telling me to stay in the car.
“Your shirt,” I say, and she pauses with the door open to look down at the blood on her shoulder. My blood from when we’d switched cars at Walgreens.
She removes the pins holding up her long auburn hair and arranges it carefully over one shoulder. Then she’s gone, disappearing into the office and returning minutes later with a key for room 5.
The chill from the air conditioner sets my teeth chattering again, and I let Mom steer me to the bed and sit me down on the salmon-colored bedspread. The curtains are already drawn, but she pulls them together again before hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside knob.
She leaves me again but returns quickly, carrying my backpack, her duffel, and the bags from her eight-minute shopping trip. She speaks while she removes various first-aid items and starts cleaning the nicks on my arms before moving to my head. Warm fingers prod around the source of the pain along my temple. “I can’t take you to a hospital. We’re going to have to do the best we can on our own. It’s not deep, but I have no way to stitch you up, so it’s likely going to scar.” Her fingers slide an inch to my hairline. “Are you dizzy?”
“Not as much as I was.”
“Good.”
It takes another five minutes before she sits back at my feet and lifts her hand to chew on her thumbnail, a gesture so familiar in such an unfamiliar situation that I get a lump in my throat. “You may have a concussion.”
I’d had one once before, from falling out of a tree. This feels worse. “You promised to explain. Mom—”
“Stop.” Her back snaps tight. “There isn’t time to tell you everything. I need to get rid of that car and—”
“Then tell me some of it. Anything.” She doesn’t want to, that much is obvious, but perhaps because I’m literally bleeding in front of her, she starts talking.
“I’ve been hiding for a very long time, since before I hadyou.”
“Did Dad know?”
She hesitates, as though the answer might reveal more than she wants. “He…No, he didn’t know.” The bed dips as she sits next to me. “I was careful, always careful. Sometimes I could almost believe they weren’t looking anymore—” She bites off whatever she was going to say next. “But now it’s different. We can’t hide. They know what we look like, where we live….”
Because I showed them. That’s what she isn’t saying. I created a dating profile with a picture of the two of us standing in front of the house they’d broken into. There was no house number in the photo; it was mostly a tree and the side of the house. And I didn’t even use her full name. But someone found us. Less than two hours after I posted it.
That isn’t possible. People can’t be found like that, can they?
