According to Margaret's almanac, it was the last truly warm day of the summer. Miss Parker was taking advantage.

No matter what Jarod suggested, Miss Parker hadn't been cowed, horsed, goated or any other barnyard animal-ed by Emily into leaving. Emily didn't have that level of influence over her. She had to admit, however, that Jarod's little sister had learned from the best when it came to tormenting Miss Parker. Little could aspire to the heights of Jarod's talent for provocation, mind you. Emily would have to take a couple of post-graduate courses in professional-grade torment before she was ready to lock Miss Parker in a shipping container and ship her back to Delaware with nothing but barbecued grasshoppers to snack on. Nevertheless, Emily's ubiquitous, low-grade harassment got on her last nerve. Even discounting all the passive-aggressive comments, the sheer presence of Emily was like that of a mosquito, a mosquito which had appointed herself Miss Parker's personal chaperon. Miss Parker and Jarod hadn't had a moment alone to talk since the night she'd returned from Casper.

After lunch, Miss Parker had seized upon an opportune moment while Emily was busy to slip up to her room for a pre-packed bag and dart out the door unnoticed. She didn't go to the Westfalia. She was through with running away. Instead, she hunted down an overgrown path leading off from the driveway and picked her way down the hill in flip-flop-clad feet, making for a spot Margaret had pointed out to her the previous day. The path was modestly paved with intermittent stones, leading down a precipitously steep slope through the woods. The trees gradually thinned and the long grasses overhanging the path became drier and more brittle from exposure to the sun, scraping at her ankles as she passed.

The rock pool was just short of the base of the hill. It was surrounded by a sparse thicket of short trees, offering partial shade.

"It's not a hot spring," Margaret had said. "We don't get many of them this far south. But it's not glacier-fed either, like the lakes here are. Not directly, anyway. So it manages to be just about perfect after a sunny morning, not ice cold like the lakes. Let me know if you'd like to give it a look, we can all go down together."

Miss Parker hadn't let Margaret know. She had less than no interest in going on a family outing with Jarod, his charming mother, and his blatantly hostile sister. And the rock pool sounded like the perfect spot to be alone for a while, without feeling suspicious eyes on her, real or imagined.

She set her bag down on one of the large, flat, smooth stones which hemmed in the pool from all sides. After glancing around to make sure she hadn't been followed, she fished her bathing suit and towel from the bag and hastily changed into the suit, leaving her clothes in an untidy heap a few feet from the pool's edge. She sank into the water, keeping a careful eye on her foot placement. One foot on this sloping stone here, the ball of her left foot in this smaller, round rock here. The water was cold enough that she tensed with each new inch of water creeping up around her legs, and cold enough to dissuade the algae growth she usually associated with swimming in a lake. She found an ideal rock at the far side of the pool, almost perfectly horizontal and submerged just far enough that when she sat on it, the water came up to her armpits.

Miss Parker pushed herself through the water back across the pool, a strategically placed hand placed here and there. She felt curiously primordial. Digging into her bag once more, she unearthed a pair of sunglasses and the doorstopper paperback she'd been nibbling her way through for a couple of weeks now. She held it aloft on the way back, paddling one-handed.

A good book, a refreshing swim, no suspicious glares making her feel like she was back at the Centre. Idyllic.

She hadn't progressed more than two pages in when a shadow fell across her reading light.

"Miss Parker."

She finished reading the sentence she was on before she looked up. Jarod stood on the edge of the pool, his restless hands juggling a rolled-up towel from one hand to the other and back.

"Jarod. You're in my light."

He stepped neatly to the side, allowing the sunlight to fall on her page.

"Apologies. I didn't know you were down here."

"Bullshit."

Jarod coughed out a laugh. "Is it?"

"Yes. Bare-faced lie." She put the book down on a dry rock. "But I don't mind."

No, she didn't mind the lie. She also didn't mind the fracturing of her moment alone. The longer she stayed away from the Centre, the less she minded.

Jarod hovered for a moment, then reached behind his back to pull off his shirt.

Miss Parker had always tried her best to compartmentalize while tracking down Jarod. Compartmentalizing their shared history was one thing, and it had the benefit of displacement in time. That shared history was with a child called Jarod, who was contiguous with this Jarod but could be separated in her mind from the current model with some effort. A second aspect demanding compartmentalization, which was another matter entirely: her attraction to Jarod.

Back in the days of active pursuit, in some ways it had been easier. It didn't (couldn't) matter that Jarod had very nice arms, a beautiful smile and a phenomenal ass, because she had to catch those arms and that smile and that ass along with the rest of him and crate it all back to the Centre. With the pursuit off the table, arguably compartmentalization was no longer necessary. She could notice if she wanted to.

Who could fault her? She ogled a little.

Jarod stepped into the water, ostensibly unaware of the pair of eyes following his calves, his forearms, his chest, his shoulders as it all vanished below the water line. Miss Parker decided she was a particular fan of Jarod's shoulders.

"It's a good thing I packed you a suit," said Jarod, nodding at her. There was something appreciative in his glance, too.

Is it?, she considered saying, just to see if she could make him blush.

"I don't think we're there yet," she said instead.

"I'm not sure what —"

"You being flippant about rooting through my things without my permission. We're not there yet."

"Yet," Jarod repeated. He pushed off the rock he was sitting on, drifting with feigned nonchalance in her direction. Miss Parker watched his approach. "Got it, noted and tabled for later. Still, it would have been a shame to miss out on the perfect day for swimming."

"Couldn't agree more," said Emily by way of announcing herself. Both Jarod and Miss Parker jerked in surprise. They looked up as one at the new arrival in an irrational panic, as if they'd been caught doing something they shouldn't. Like twitterpated teenagers caught in the neighbour's hot tub.

"Emily," said Jarod in greeting, and Miss Parker had to fight down a laugh at the note of aggravation she detected in Jarod's tone. "You decided to come down for a swim, too. Great minds think alike. I thought you said you were going for a run?"

Emily was dressed for a run. She wore running shoes, and her ponytail was pulled through the back of a baseball cap. To cap it off, she held a water bottle in one hand.

"Like you said, J," said Emily with a steely grin at Miss Parker. "I couldn't miss out on the perfect day for a swim."


Once they returned to the house, chilled and dissatisfied en masse, Jarod made his excuses and shut himself up in his room. Miss Parker watched him go, reluctantly curious. Was he upset? If so, why?

Why do you give a shit?, asked a tiny, stubborn corner of her mind.

She needn't have worried — if indeed, she'd worried at all. An hour or so later, Jarod emerged from his room, tapping something the size and shape of a credit card against his palm and looking pleased with himself. Miss Parker glanced up briefly from the coffee table, where she'd spread out a series of maps of the United States and was marking the location of every Centre satellite office she could remember off the top of her head. Emily hovered over her shoulder, looking distinctly annoyed at her own interest.

"Wait, that's a satellite office? I've been there!" said Emily, tapping one of the sharpie marks with her finger. "They sell amazing scones."

"Not underground, they don't. Well. They make the scones underground, yes. But they also process regional data for the Centre. On top of that, it's the pacific northwest hub for sweepers in the field."

"Miss Parker?"

He dropped the card on the table in front of her, where it obscured northern California. She picked it up. It was a driver's license. A fake one, given the photo was the same as the one on Miss Parker's own driver's license, but her name certainly wasn't…

"Marcia?" she said, reading aloud. The name on the ID read Marcia James, whose birth date was the same as her own. "That's worse than Marcelle."

"This way you can answer to 'Marcie' either way," Jarod pointed out, grinning.

"You feel free to call me 'Marcie' if you're tired of having ten toes, Jarod, I can start whittling that number down for you," she said, but without any real venom.

"Think of it as a welcome gift: welcome to the fugitive life. Any good fugitive needs a fake ID."

Miss Parker twisted the card between her fingers, examining it from every angle. It was polished and professional, nothing less than she'd expect from a Pretender who'd spent time as a counterfeiter with organized crime. It was a nice thought, too. She'd be able to run into town for a bottle of wine if she liked, and not worry if the guy at the liquor store decided to be a dick and card her. A muscle tightened in Miss Parker's jaw. It was a nice thought, sure, but then… she didn't want to be a fugitive. She'd been on the other side of that equation, and even from the pursuer's point of view, she could tell she wanted no part of a life where she was always on the run.

"Thanks," she said, absently. She could feel Jarod's eyes on her, knew that he'd noticed her reaction.

"Are you all right, Miss Parker?"

She stood. Beside her, Emily slid into her vacated seat to examine the marked map more closely.

"Fine. Early night, I think," said Miss Parker, stiff and curt. She looked around her. "Anyone seen my book?"

"'Early night?' It's barely eight-thirty," said Emily, without looking up from the object of her attention. "And nope, haven't seen it." Her voice had lost some of its snappish quality. If Miss Parker had known all it would take for a little relief from Emily was the locations of the Centre's satellite offices, she would have gotten the treason over with sooner.

Neither Jarod nor Margaret had seen the book, either. It wasn't a big deal, but a bit of reading material made for a serviceable shield whenever life with Jarod and his family got to be too much. Miss Parker turned over every cushion in the living room, and re-checked every corner of the impromptu beach bag she'd used earlier in the afternoon.

"It's likely down at the pool. You can get it in the morning, Marcelle," said Margaret. Miss Parker didn't cringe at the use of her name. She wasn't used to it, per se, but it had lost the power to get a rise out of her.

In her mind's eye, Miss Parker saw herself put down the book to watch Jarod climb into the pool with her. She hadn't picked it up again. It was still sitting there.

"Shit," she said, with feeling. It was a good ten-minute walk down to the pool in the high noon sun, longer in the dark. "Shit."

"It's only a book."

Miss Parker shot the back of Emily's head a weak glare. That decided it. She headed for the stairs down to the entrance area.

"I'll get it," said Jarod, once he realized where she was headed, at the same time that Margaret said, "Hang on, Jarod can get it for you, hon."

"No, you won't. And no, he can't. I can get a damn book myself."

Margaret relented only when Miss Parker agreed to pack her purse with a flashlight and bear spray.

"Keep that handy," said Margaret, after showing her how to use the bear spray. "This is the bears' home more than it is ours."


Miss Parker found the book where she'd left it, splayed page-down, cover-up on a handy rock. The sun was setting, its orange glow reflected in the water. She headed back the way she'd come; if she hurried, she might be able to get back to the house before the sky turned pitch black.

As soon as she stepped back onto the gravel-paved driveway, she could tell there was something wrong. The first sign was the post holding up Margaret's mailbox, which was dented and threatening to pour the contents of the mailbox into the road-side ditch. The second sign was even more glaring: a black SUV was parked on the far side of the building, out of view of the kitchen windows. It wasn't Margaret's car, nor Emily's. It could be someone harmless, maybe even Major Charles finally coming home, but the squeeze of dread in Miss Parker's chest told her otherwise. She groped for her purse, not taking her eyes off the house — but no, even when she'd picked the purse up from the couch, it had felt a little too light, hadn't it? She looked inside to be certain: flashlight, bear spray… no gun.

"God dammit, Emily," she hissed under her breath.

As she drew closer to the house, figures became clear through the kitchen window, illuminated by the light of the overhead lamp: Jarod and Emily stood with their backs to the window, frozen in combative postures; and there was Margaret, with someone else behind her shoulder. A man, Miss Parker thought. No, the figure wasn't just behind her shoulder, he was holding Margaret from behind, and Margaret had her head tilted up like there was a weapon being held to her throat.

Someone was threatening to kill Margaret.

Miss Parker's every muscle tensed with the impulse to tear, rip, rend. She ran through a quick catalogue of all the tools available to her, coming up disappointingly short. The list largely consisted of sticks, heavy sticks, and pointy sticks. She looked back through the window at the man behind Margaret. All she could make out was short hair. And behind him….

Behind him was the door to the basement.

An idea began to germinate in Miss Parker's mind.

She set off on a counter-clockwise loop around the house, stepping gingerly as she went. The last thing she wanted was to trip over something in the dark and startle the man into shooting or stabbing Margaret. The house was surrounded in peaty thicket, which tore at her clothes and tear as she pushed her way through. Around her, night fell. Finally, the toe of her shoe knocked against something hard in the grass around the back of the house, near the path down to the rock pool: a storm cellar. Once Miss Parker cleared the overgrowth from the door, the sight of doors to the cellar prompted a sigh of relief. There was no padlock, no keyhole, just a flimsy pair of doors embedded in the ground. This was not to say it was easy to open. Miss Parker braced the ball of one foot against the frame and heaved upwards until the caked-on grime accumulated over the passing years gave way with a sucking sound and the doors slammed open, sending wobbly reverberations through the foundations. Frozen in place, she listened for answering sounds — approaching footsteps and the like — but none came. The only change was that the murmur of voices from the kitchen stammered to a halt. After a tense moment, they started up again. The voices were louder now that the storm cellar doors were open. Jarod's characteristic baritone could be picked out from the group; the other voices were less distinctive.

Miss Parker climbed into the cellar and pulled the doors shut behind her. She'd never been down here. It was unfurnished and uninsulated, and the only light source was a glowing hairline crack highlighting the door to the kitchen. By this limited lighting, Miss Parker could make out the shape of a water heater and several boxes of winter clothes. One wall was lined with dusty wine bottles, and there was a bare wooden staircase leading up to the ground floor. Through the gaps between the steps, she could discern the shapes of a pair of kayaks.

Once she reached the bottom of the stairs, the voices from the kitchen sharpened. One voice in particular stood out, a voice she would have been only too pleased never to hear again.

"I know she's here," said Lyle. "I'm not leaving without my sister. Where is she?" This last escalated to a bellow. A gasp quickly followed — Margaret?

"What does he want?" Margaret asked, voice shaking. "Someone, tell me. He has us, what does he want?"

"I just said —"

"She's deaf," Jarod snapped. "She can't hear you. Please, put the knife down."

"He wants Miss Parker, Mom." Emily's voice, high and frenzied. "That's how you found us, isn't it? She told you. That bitch, we opened our home to her and she —"

"Shut up," said Lyle, cutting her off.

As Lyle launched back into his demands, Miss Parker crept up the stairs. Jarod had given her a vital piece of the puzzle: Lyle was carrying a knife, not a gun. If he were startled, he could certainly nick Margaret with the blade, but unless he made a deliberate choice to hurt her, he wouldn't kill her accidentally. Not like a gun, where a twitch of the trigger finger would propel a bullet straight into Margaret's skull — Miss Parker shook her head, trying her damnedest to avoid superimposing the image of Lorefice's brains on the wall in Philadelphia over the backdrop of Margaret's stove back-splash.

A knife was easier, by a slim margin.

"I'm going to count to three, and you'll tell me where you're keeping her," said Lyle. "One."

Miss Parker knocked thrice against the hand railing. One, two, three. The voices behind the door stopped abruptly.

"What was that?" said Lyle.

"What? What?" Poor Margaret only had the facial reactions of her son and daughter to go by, and sounded more confused than ever. Miss Parker squinted at the spot where door met frame. No hinges. The door opened outward, into the kitchen. She felt around in the dark until her hand closed on a glass jar crammed full with tools. The screwdriver was the perfect size. She pushed it through the latch on the inside of the basement door.

"Are you…" Lyle's voice came closer. "Are you keeping her in the basement? Huh. I wouldn't have believed that of you, Jarod. Maybe that was your sister's idea, huh?"

Miss Parker waited a beat, then hammered thrice at the door to the kitchen with the flat of her fist. She covered her mouth with one hand.

"Help!" she called, her voice deliberately muffled.

On the other side, Lyle rattled the door handle.

"It's locked," he said. A yelp, possibly Margaret's, punctuated this observation. Lyle must have doubled down on his threat. "Unlock it now, or I start carving. Hang on, Parker!"

He sounded as if he were trying to reassure her, which was ridiculous. Who was this performance for? Jarod? Miss Parker herself? She doubted the former, but the latter was a bizarre prospect. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time Lyle had tried to make her believe he'd turned over a new leaf and become something morally salvageable. The question then became, why would he want Miss Parker to think he'd changed? He was running the Centre, surely he had enough allies without her on his side. In any case, she had no time to dissect her brother's monstrous mind. Miss Parker leaped nimbly over the hand railing and alighted on the basement floor. She felt around under the stairs; with the kayaks pushed aside, there was just enough room to maneuver.

"It's not locked," came Jarod's voice. "It must just be stuck."

A shuffling sound, accompanied by pained gasps from Margaret.

"Emma, or whatever your name is. Get the door, now."

"We don't keep —" Emily protested.

"Now!"

Emily pulled and heaved at the door until finally, the screwdriver slipped and the door burst open, sending a violent arc of light bounding into the cramped, damp space. That was fine. All Miss Parker had needed was time.

"Parker!" Lyle called. Miss Parker let him call out twice more before she answered, a hand still plastered over her mouth.

"Down here," she called. "Help!"

The tip of Lyle's shoe appeared over the edge of the first stair.

"Parker? Where are you?"

And he made a crucial mistake. He let go of Margaret for just long enough to take one step down, into the basement.

Channelling the fear of every child who has ever dreaded going down into a poorly-lit basement, Miss Parker shot out a hand through the gap between the stairs, grabbed Lyle's ankle, and pulled. For a suspended moment, his outstretched fingers clawed at thin, insubstantial air. Then, just as Miss Parker had hoped, he overbalanced and went crashing down the stairs. His knee hit wood, his ankle hooked around a stair, and his body pivoted around the point. He landed hard on his shoulder. Lyle slid three steps down, thunk, thunk, thunk, and ground to a halt at the bottom, nose smashed into the concrete. He groaned, and for a moment he just lay there, dazed from the pain. Once the immediate shock passed, one arm came up and pushed Lyle up into an inadvertent sphinx pose. He stared around blindly, blinking frantically to clear the spots in his vision.

Miss Parker extricated herself from the stairs and, before Lyle could get his feet under him, shot a cloud of bear spray at his face from the side. He recoiled in surprise; then, as the orange splatter dripped into his eyes, he let loose a throat-ripping scream of pain and rage and stumbled into the wall with the heels of his hands pressed against screwed-tight eyelids. Miss Parker still wasn't done. She grabbed the neck of the nearest wine bottle protruding from the wall rack and stalked over to Lyle. Looming over his huddled form, she raised the wine bottle and swung it down in an elegant arc, aiming for her brother's head. She wasn't thinking too much about the consequences, just that she needed Lyle down for the count, now. Dumb luck chose that moment to favour Lyle, however, and he ducked down to bury his face in his shirt at just the right moment to avoid being brained. The bottle struck his shoulder, the same shoulder that had borne the brunt of the fall down the stairs. Lyle howled, the sound muffled by the fabric over his mouth. Miss Parker swung the bottle back up to finish the job.

"Wait!"

Margaret stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the kitchen. Miss Parker couldn't read her expression, her face being obscured by shadow. She was holding a sheaf of zip ties, which she tossed down the stairs. Miss Parker caught them unthinkingly and looked back up the stairs at Margaret's shadowed profile. She didn't know what the woman was thinking, but she'd hear Margaret out, she owed her that much. Miss Parker knelt with her knee between Lyle's shoulder blades to hold him face-down, and got to work, ignoring his groans of pain and indignation. Giving her brother the furthest thing from the benefit of the doubt, she used every zip tie in the sheaf rendering him as immobile as possible.

"Who'sere? Who'sere?" he grumbled all the while, still half-dazed from the pain.

Once she'd used the last of the zip ties to attach the tie around his ankles to a convenient pipe running along the wall, Miss Parker climbed the stairs. She squinted as she emerged into the brightly-lit kitchen, pausing to shut and latch the door behind her. Jarod and his family were nowhere to be seen. There were signs of a fight here and there: upturned chairs, a smashed plate, a chip or two out of the wall plaster that hadn't been there a half-hour previous. Miss Parker followed the trail back to the entrance area. The door hadn't been forced.

A heated, muttered exchange drifted down from the second floor landing, its words indistinct. Miss Parker followed the sound and found Jarod et al in the living room, having regrouped out of Lyle's earshot.

"What the hell happened?" said Miss Parker. "When did — where are you going?"

Jarod brushed by her silently and disappeared in the direction of the basement.

"What does it look like?" said Emily, quickly escalating to a shout. "Your brother showed up, said he was here to bring you and Jarod back to the Centre. But the interesting part —" Emily grinned manically and stepped into Miss Parker's space, crowding her. Miss Parker stared back, stone-faced. "The interesting part, you'll never guess. He said Jarod kidnapped you. Where would he get that idea? All this time, I couldn't figure out why you'd just stay here, twiddling your thumbs, but you needed an alibi when you got back to the Centre, didn't you? The Centre wouldn't buy that you took this long to retrieve Jarod yourself, not when you've been spotted heading —"

"Would you shut up?" said Miss Parker. Emily ground to a sputtering halt, looking like she might bore a hole through Miss Parker's temple given half the chance. "If you think I called Lyle in as an exit strategy, not only do you not understand the first thing about me, you don't understand anything about your new resident basement monster either. By the way, I could have solved that a lot cleaner if I'd had my damn gun. I take it its absence is your doing, Emily?"

"Mine, actually," said Margaret.

"You — what?" said Miss Parker, momentarily so taken aback that she forgot to sign. "Why would you take my gun?"

Margaret was holding one hand to her neck. She pulled back the hand to examine the blood on her fingers. There was a shallow cut on her neck where Lyle had nicked her.

"Don't go taking it as an insult or sign of distrust," she said stiffly, not looking Miss Parker in the eye. "I believe you have great potential, Miss Parker, but you and I both know you are a work in progress. I'm not so optimistic that I believe a person's world view can be completely reversed in less than a week's time. You didn't need the temptation. You don't need it now, either."

Miss Parker groped for words. She keenly wished it had been Emily who had taken the gun. She didn't know how to be angry with Margaret. A part of her, she realized, connected Jarod's mother to the persistent presence of Catherine Parker. It was almost a relief when Emily stepped in.

"Good," said Emily. "The last thing we need is another armed Parker."

"Did you miss the fact that I just saved all your asses?" said Miss Parker. "Fine, Margaret, you had your reservations about me. I still need my gun."

"What are you going to do with it?" asked Margaret quietly.

Emily cut in: "No, Mom. Don't even think about giving it back to her."

"What are you going to do with it, Miss Parker?" asked Jarod from behind Miss Parker. He'd returned from the basement with a small, silver key, which he was using to unlock a pair of handcuffs from around his wrists. Miss Parker boggled at him.

"What the hell do you think I'm going to do? Lyle found this place, he can do it again. Forgive the cliché, but he knows too much. I've killed Lyle before, back when he was nothing more harmful than an ex-employee with a chip on his shoulder, as far as anyone knew. I can do it again."

That appeared to bring Emily up short, if nothing else. She snorted.

"Right. You're going to murder your own brother."

"Happily," Miss Parker spat. "And you should be cheering me on. He killed your brother, right? Kyle. Did you ever even meet Kyle? Did Lyle give you the chance?"

Emily was struck silent, squinting at Miss Parker as if trying to interpret a mess of soggy leaves at the bottom of a teacup.

"Fine," Emily burst out, throwing her hands in the air in a gesture suggesting she'd washed her hands of the matter. "Lyle dies. I won't exactly be sobbing into my pillow. Once it's done, though — when you've done it, Parker, you're gone."

Margaret and Jarod both started talking at once.

"You're not sending her away," said Jarod, raising his voice, as much good as it did him. Emily whirled on him.

"How did he find us?" It came out in a strangled yell. Even Margaret flinched. Emily turned on Miss Parker and jabbed her in the collar bone with an out-thrust index finger. "We'd finally found a place to be a family together, and a matter of days after you muscle your way in, your brother shows up. You expect me to believe that's, what, that's a coincidence? Parker family instinct? I don't know what that whole thing with the basement stairs was, and I don't give a shit. More manipulation, probably. I know you gave away the ranch house, knowingly or not, and I won't put up with you in my home another night."

"Emily, no," said Jarod. He wasn't yelling, but his baritone had a carrying quality. "Miss Parker saved Mom's life, and she did it by attacking the current head of the Centre's main office. If we send her away now, she'll have cross-hairs on her back just as much as we do."

Miss Parker raised a finger.

"Point of order, no," she said. "No, I will not. Not when I off Lyle."

Jarod shot her an impatient look. "We're not killing Lyle."

"Why the hell not?" said Miss Parker, at the same time that Emily said "Why not?". They glanced at each other and quickly looked away, discomfited by the sheer fact of agreeing with each other.

"Think about it for more than five seconds," said Margaret. She managed to sound brutally scathing without the benefit of auditory feedback. "Unless Mr Lyle is very foolish, he will have told Centre representatives where he was going. If they're not here now, they will be soon, at the latest when Mr Lyle's absence is noted. Killing Mr Lyle will not change that. I wouldn't cry over Lyle's dead body, myself. The man killed my son, my Kyle. But killing him now is strategically worse than useless, and would only slow us down. We need to leave tonight."

There was an angry tremor in her voice when she spoke of Kyle, and Miss Parker realized with a guilty lurch that everyone present had been wronged by Lyle worse than she had. Hell, she might not have the right to be the one to pull the trigger if and when the time came.

Emily looked around the room. Her gaze paused on the fireplace, the stairs up down to the entrance where a collection of shoes were scattered around the front door, the dark hallway leading to the bedrooms, the wooden loon in the middle of the coffee table. Her face slackened in an expression of compounded sadness, taking in the familiar surroundings and mourning what she was doomed to abandon. Miss Parker couldn't blame her. It had been nice while it lasted.

"You're right," Emily said. "We have to leave. I have another safe house secured and standing by, we can leave tonight if we pack efficiently. God damn it." She looked up, and locked spiteful gazes with Miss Parker. "No matter where we're going, if I'm going, you're not."

"Emily —" started Jarod.

"No. No, Jarod," said Emily, shaking her head. She smiled without humour. "God, Jarod, she really fooled you, didn't she? Nostalgia's a bitch of a thing. I don't care who she was when she was twelve, this Miss Parker just burned our home around us. Those are my terms: if she goes to the alternate safe house, I don't."

Miss Parker's stomach dropped like a pebble through creek-water; on the outside, her face was a wooden mask. She wouldn't be able to wriggle her way out of an ultimatum like that. Worse, she knew Jarod had a point: if Lyle had the opportunity to report back to the Centre, she was as good as dead. There were many reasons to want to stick by Jarod — more all the time — but the most urgent of these at the moment was saving her own skin. Jarod knew from personal experience how to stay away from the Centre, and staying with him would keep her safe for the moment. Flying in the face of this plan was the ugly truth, that there was no way he was going to choose her over his newly-reunited sister.

She expected Jarod to turn to her with a painfully earnest apology on his lips. Which, OK, that was fine. She could survive running on her own. Hell, maybe she'd take out Lyle on the way out the door, just to give herself a head start. One less serial killer in the world, right? She'd be doing everyone a favour, no matter what Jarod and his warped sense of morality said.

But Jarod did not turn to her with an apology. The apology was there in Jarod's eyes, but it wasn't directed at her. Miss Parker glanced from face to face, certain she must be misinterpreting something.

"I'm sorry, Em," said Jarod, impossibly.

"What?" said Emily, barely above a whisper. "You're sorry? What do you mean?"

"You and Mom should go to the safe house. I'm not going."

You could have heard a mouse cough in the silence that followed. Miss Parker was tempted to pinch herself.

"Not going? That's ridiculous," said Emily. There was half a laugh in her voice, but it sounded like it could morph into a sob at any moment. "Jarod… you're coming with us. You have to."

Margaret didn't say anything. She was watching her son, and by the look in her eye, she didn't understand any better than Emily or Miss Parker did. Jarod looked down and watched his words tumble out of his hands through sign, a few words in advance of his lips.

"I've been running for a long time. We all have," he said. His gaze fell on Miss Parker and his lip twitched. "Running or chasing. When I found the two of you — Mom, Em — I thought I could stop, I thought I could find a way to stop running. That's what I told Miss Parker to convince her to come. I told her she could talk to you, Mom, and I told her I was only running on my own terms now, when I chose to, and that I would share how I'd pulled it off." A brief huff of a laugh. "I'm beginning to think, though, that I can only stop running if I… stop running."

Miss Parker was still lost. She looked from Jarod to Margaret, whose eyes were widening.

"Could you stop talking in platitudes for two seconds, Jarod?" said Miss Parker. "That secondary safe house doesn't sound like too bad of an idea. Wouldn't have minded an invitation, but if nothing else, you'd be safe with your family. And Emily is… probably right, at least on one count." She took a breath, avoiding Margaret's eye. It was surreal, how quickly Margaret's opinion had come to mean the world to her. "When I left that day and made it all the way to Casper, I wasn't planning on coming back. I changed my mind, but before I did, a cop spotted me in a town near here. Moran's not that far from here, I bet if Lyle asked around, he could have followed the breadcrumbs from there to the house. It's the only thing I can think of that could have led Lyle back here. Emily may not be so far off the mark."

She wasn't sure why she was arguing against her own best interests. Maybe it was Jarod's words, 'stop running', disturbing her in a way she couldn't quite parse. Maybe it was the fear in Margaret's widening eyes. Or maybe it was only the wringing feeling in her gut telling her she could not, could not be the reason Jarod was separated from his family again.

"The safe house in Washington is a band-aid, it only fixes the issue temporarily," said Jarod. He didn't look up when Emily made a wordless noise of outrage, presumably at Jarod giving away the location of her back-up plan. "I've had enough, haven't you? All of you?"

"You don't want to do this," said Margaret slowly.

"Do what?" Emily wailed, beside herself with the frustration of being the last one in on the joke. Jarod ignored them both.

"Miss Parker, did your brother see you down in the basement?"

Miss Parker cast her thoughts back, re-watching the scene in a series of sepia stills: grabbing Lyle's ankle, watching him fall, the shot of capsaicin to the face, swinging the wine bottle at his head — could he have seen her before she hit him with the bear spray? No, he'd been facing away from her, too distracted by the pain to look around — then she'd tied him down with a knee pressed into his back, face against the floor.

"No-o," she said carefully. "No, I don't think he did. Once I got him in the eyes with the bear spray, he wasn't seeing anything."

"So, as of now he has every reason to believe you really were confined against your will in the basement?"

The puzzle pieces slotted into place.

"You want to play along with his theory that you kidnapped me."

Jarod nodded. "I believe he'll play into it, given any excuse. He was acting… odd from the moment he had us all together in the kitchen, like he was playing at being the Concerned, Protective Brother. You'll forgive me if I find that act hard to believe. I have clear memories of him holding a weapon to your head, the night Kyle died."

The invocation of Kyle's death prompted a collective wince around the circle.

"OK, so that might — might — get me back into the Centre's good graces," said Miss Parker. "But what's all this 'stop running' stuff about?"

Jarod looked at her, and Miss Parker saw real fear in his eyes.

"Miss Parker, how would you like to return to the Centre as a conquering hero?"