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Soph?”
    Her daughter avoided meeting her eyes. “I guess,” she said.
    She stroked Sophie’s hair. It was still baby-soft, in spite of the dye job, and Annie was reminded of the two-year-old her daughter had once been. Time moved so quickly. In another couple of years, Sophie would start looking at colleges. Where had the time gone? It was all a blur of family vacations and PTA meetings, Saturday morning cartoons and soccerpractice, and all the little day-to-day things that made life so precious. They’d had their squabbles, as all families do, but for the most part, Sophie had been a joy to raise. She’d been an easy baby and an easier child. At least she had until adolescence had reared its ugly head. Annie could only pray that once the current hormonal madness was over, Soph would turn back into a regular person, a bright, sweet young woman with a good head on her shoulders.
    She planted a kiss on top of the aforementioned head. “Well, then, Miss Muffet—” Sophie groaned at the old family nickname “—what do you say we start unloading the car? Then we’ll take a drive into town and see if we can find that furniture store.”
    “Okay, but if we’re really staying this time, I want to get a job.”
    “Oh, Soph.” Her heart took a sudden and unexpected plunge. “We’ve talked about this before.”
    “And every time we talk about it, you refuse to listen to me!”
    “You’re only fifteen years old. Right now, you should be concentrating on being a kid. Keeping your grades up, enjoying life, going to school dances and football games and parties. A job would interfere with that. You’ll be in the working world soon enough.” She brushed a wisp of hair away from her daughter’s face. “Why rush it?”
    “It would only be until school starts. Think about it, Mom. I’m stuck all summer in the puckerbrush in this dead little town where I don’t know anybody. What am I supposed to do with myself all day if I don’t have a job?” Sophie sent a disparaging glance around the empty room. “I’ll go nuts if I have to sit around this place all the time.”
    Sophie was right. She hated to admit it, but her daughter had a point. Still she was afraid to give in. It wasn’t just her reluctance to see Sophie growing up too quickly that concernedher. There was more to it than that. Ever since the day they’d fled their hometown with little more than the clothes on their backs, she’d been terrified to let her daughter out of her sight. Sending her to public school had been torture. Even though there was no way the school, or anybody else for that matter, could connect Sophie Kendall of Las Vegas with Sophie Spinney of Atchawalla, Mississippi, still Annie had lived in terror that they’d be found, that something unspeakable would happen to her daughter. A parent’s worse nightmare.
    She knew she was being paranoid. She knew that sooner or later she would have to relinquish her rock-solid maternal grasp. It wasn’t good for Sophie. Wasn’t good for either of them.
    But not yet. Not when they hadn̻t even had time to unpack, let alone acquaint themselves with this place. “Maybe you could work for me,” she said. “In the video store.”
    Sophie’s look of horror would have been comical if she hadn’t been so serious about it. “Yeah, right, Mom. Do you have any idea how lame that would be, working for my own mother? I don’t think so. I want a real job, one that’ll allow me to get out of this dump once in a while.”
    Annie sighed. “I’ll think about it, Soph. But not until we’ve had time to get settled.”
    The police cruiser thumped down the rutted driveway hard enough to knock Davy Hunter’s teeth together. He really ought to get the damn driveway taken care of. Fill in the potholes, spread some new gravel. Live a little less like some backwoods hillbilly. At one time, he’d planned to build a house here and have the trailer hauled off to its eternal rest. But after Chelsea died and he