Chapter 1
Gwyneth Tyler sat in her basement and worried.
Those seemed the only actions she was capable of some days, and they usually went together like that.
The bills for that month were spread in a fan before her. On top of them lay an ID claiming her to be three years older – and an inch taller – than she actually was. It wasn’t the false identity she worried about, though. No, that she could get away with. Nobody looked too closely at IDs unless you were buying something you shouldn’t be, and besides, she looked at least nineteen.
It was the bills that had her worried – the bills that she wasn’t sure she could pay that month. She no longer had a job, and to get one meant needing false records that proved she was who she said she was. She wasn’t, but that wasn’t the point. Those records had all been destroyed in the kitchen fire she’d so stupidly started last week. And the man who supplied her with her false records had died earlier that month, making getting new records virtually impossible.
Of course, she could legally get a job – she was fifteen, after all, not too young for a job bagging groceries. But that would mean admitting how old she was, and that would risk having the people she bought the house from finding out, and that could possibly mean jail.
And that would mean that they would come into her home to rent it out again, search through it, and find…well, everything. And that…that might mean a lifetime of prison.
So she sat in her basement in a house she didn’t deserve to own in front of bills she had no idea how to pay.
The man with the glasses watched from the window.
Colette Irving sat in her car and worried.
There was too much going on – too much of everything. Jessica had a dance recital today. Kyle wanted to go to dinner with her. The driver behind her couldn’t seem to lean off the horn for half a second. Traffic was thicker than she’d seen it in weeks. And the police were going to find her soon.
But she couldn’t think of that last thing. Just because this was the first time it was being reported on the news didn’t mean they would necessarily track her. She’d just have to remember to go smaller next time – hit one of those tiny stores that nobody ever bothered to raise any fuss about.
She sighed and pulled one of the cigarettes off the dashboard. She lit it and let it hang from her fingertips out the window of the car, hoping the weatherman was wrong about the rain. Jessica loved the chalk drawings they’d made on the sidewalk on Tuesday.
She sat and breathed in the smoky smell that reminded her of her childhood. Her father used to smoke, didn’t he? Not a cigarette, or a cigar, but a pipe. A pipe! What kind of person smoked a pipe?
Then again, what kind of person was her father? She wasn’t quite sure of the answer.
She shook her head to clear it. Her daughter’s dance recital. Kyle’s date. The asshole in the other car. These were the problems that she needed to worry about. She ran through them again and again, and when she thought she’d go crazy from running through them, she tried in as many languages as she could.
The man with the glasses watched from the window.
Sawyer Jarvis sat in his math class and worried.
The second hand on the clock seemed to represent a minute. Every tick dribbled away time that he would rather be spending not here.
He had a job tonight. Not a big one, nor a particularly difficult one. But a job. And that required concentration – something that was short to come by in this classroom.
