Shiver

glance reassured her that what was on was the Disney Channel, and she immediately understood why he looked so entranced. At home, they didn’t have cable, because she couldn’t afford it.
    “Bye.” Her son waved her off, clearly unconcerned about her pending absence. Having eased himself down in the same chair Sanders had occupied earlier and picked up the newspaper, Marco regarded her sardonically.
    “You can relax. He’s still going to be here when you get back,” he said.
    Sam was already heading out the door when she realized that she really wasn’t anxious about leaving Tyler at all. As soon as she figured out why—the reason stood about six-two and walked on crutches—she frowned ferociously. But it was too late. She was in the car by then, and there was nobody who mattered to see.
    “Sun in your eyes?” Groves asked solicitously, and flipped down her sun visor for her to block the rays that she hadn’t even noticed. He was driving the Toyota Corolla that had been in the garage. It was blue, it was a four-door, it was nondescript. In other words, it was perfect.
    “Thanks,” Sam said from the passenger seat beside him without explaining that her fierce look had had nothing whatsoever to do with the blinding summer sun. Banishing the Marco-induced scowl, she slid a sideways look at Groves. Sandersmight be about as chatty as a wall; she might not feel like having any kind of real conversation with Marco. But Groves was friendly. Groves she liked. Him, she might get to talk, and in this case knowledge just might prove to be a valuable thing. “So where did the car come from?”
    Groves shrugged. “It was there with the house.”
    “Just like this T-shirt”—Sam plucked at the one she was wearing—“and the rest of the clothes we’ve been wearing were there with the house?”
    “Yup.”
    “Who put them there?”
    Groves shrugged again. “The house was set up fully equipped for us to use. What can I tell you?”
    Sam felt a chill. If the house was set up for them, then the number of people who potentially knew where they were was larger than she had realized. What was that saying about three people being able to keep a secret if two of them were dead? What about a whole bureaucracy full of people? Suddenly the quiet neighborhood no longer felt so safe. They’d left the street with the town houses behind, and were now driving through a suburb filled with single-family homes. Late-model cars sat in driveways and kids rode their bikes down sidewalks while the adults did things like mow the yard and water the flowers. It was the kind of place that Sam would have given just about anything to be able to raise Tyler in, but even though the houses didn’t look especially pricey they were as totally out of reach for someone like her as the moon. Home for her and Tyler had never been so picture perfect, but still it had been home. Samsuddenly longed for the normalcy the neighborhood represented with a fierceness that surprised her. She wanted to be back in her own life, back in her own house, her job, her routine, in the worst way.
    Instead of how to pay the bills—her worst pre-Marco worry—she now had to worry about how to keep herself and her son alive. The trade-off totally sucked.
    “When we left St. Louis, nobody was supposed to know where we were going,” she protested uneasily. “So how could the house be set up in advance?”
    “It wasn’t set up for you—or rather, Marco—specifically. It’s a safe house; the service maintains a bunch of them in various locations across the country. The couple who was supposed to be sent here got diverted somewhere else at the last minute, when our emergency came up.”
    “Greg and Laura James? And their son, Tyler?” From the first time she’d heard the names, it had seemed beyond odd that her son and their son were both called Tyler.
    Groves shook his head. “Those are cover identities. Greg and Laura James are the names that this couple was going into hiding under while they stayed at the house you’re in. They didn’t have a kid, so there wasn’t a cover ID for him, but that’s okay: your kid got sandwiched into the deal, and they decided to keep his real first name. It’s easier.”
    “Who decided?”
    Groves shrugged. It was clear from his expression that if he knew, he wasn’t saying. “The good news is nobody changed the paperwork on the previous couple, so even if there is a molethey won’t be able to find you—uh, Marco.