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kidnapping, some guy named Jimmy, someone who was willing to commit a heinous crime to make Kennedy McManus miserable.
    Taylor had to do something.
    But what?
    This story made her a fugitive.
    No, worse than that.
    She was dead.
    She didn’t exist.
    She had nowhere to go.
    She searched and found the story repeated in every major newspaper in the country. For some reason—slow news week—this story had caught the country’s imagination. Predictably, the Idaho Mountain Express, Sun Valley’s weekly newspaper, had featured her as a local girl gone wrong, complete with her fourth-grade school photo, big teeth and crooked bangs, and a picture of the Summers’s home before demolition.
    She rubbed her sunburned forehead. Rubbed her cracked, blistered lips. Rubbed her bloodshot eyes. She felt as if she needed to wipe herself clean from this terrible injustice. She got up and paced away, came back and sat down, and read more articles that restated those same wrong “facts” as if they were gospel, searching for some version of the facts. The truth. But it wasn’t there.
    She did find that the few remains of Taylor Summers the FBI had been able to recover were now buried in a cemetery in Maryland.
    Her mother knew perfectly well Taylor wanted to be buried in Idaho.
    Or maybe her mother didn’t. They’d never discussed Taylor’s desires when it came to her death. Why would they? Taylor was twenty-nine, in excellent health, both physical and mental, although to read these articles, it was clear her mental health was now in doubt. In fact, when she made the mistake of reading the comments, it became clear she was a woman despised and reviled throughout the world. She was a pariah—or would be, if she was alive.
    The comments finally drove her from her morbid fascination with her own demise and into the bathroom. She turned on the water. She peeled off her clothes and stuffed them into the trash under the sink. She pulled the plastic bag out of the can and put it by the door. She stepped into the glass shower enclosure and into the steamy warmth, and scrubbed herself hard, peeling off a week’s worth of grime, scrubbing under her nails, trying to avoid the memory of the erroneous articles and the harsh comments. How dare those people, total strangers, read about her life and presume to make judgment?
    She found herself talking out loud, arguing with unseen opponents, defending herself for a crime she hadn’t committed.
    “I was trying to help that kid. I put my life on the line for a child I didn’t even know. I didn’t do it blindly. I knew I was putting myself at risk. Maybe it wasn’t the best plan. I mean, it was a stupid plan. But it worked! It’s not like I expected any thanks. I didn’t. But I didn’t expect to freeze and starve and live in constant fear from every beast in the forest. I didn’t expect to have my car booby-trapped and exploded, and in the process, almost get blown up. I didn’t expect to descend into such desperation that I broke into my own house…” Her voice broke. She gave a hard, dry sob.
    She washed her hair, using copious amounts of shampoo and conditioner, trying to remove pine sap and needles and dirt and tangles …
    “I’m a criminal. I’m afraid to go back to civilization. I’m afraid they’ll put me in prison. I’m afraid Dash, who is evidently as free as a bird and not a suspect at all, will find and kill me. How did this happen? No good deed goes unpunished, and all that? Winter’s coming. How can I survive? I’m going to die up here.”
    She heard her voice echoing off the tile. She was ranting. She sounded like a crazy woman. Maybe she was a crazy woman.
    She used the squeegee to clean the shower—this place had saved her life, and she wanted to leave it the same way she’d found it. She got out, wrapped one towel around her head and one around her body. She stood indecisively, then started toward the closet. She had to have something else to wear. She hoped to