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swear on her grandmother’s life that she wouldn’t run away or scream.
    Screaming wouldn’t have helped anyway. There was the overpowering sound of the rain. There was the thunder. But also, in the moment just after I waved them in, an ambulance went by, itssiren blaring. The coincidence was uncanny. If there was a moment when we could have still undone everything, that siren cut it short. It fired us into action, and fifteen seconds later the four of us were drenched but safely inside the studio. I locked the door behind us.

    Off the hallway was the studio’s main recording room. Inside, along the walls, were two much smaller rooms, A and B. The doors to each room were made of glass so that musicians could see one another while recording.
    Room A used to be a storage closet and locked from the outside . The girl sat on the floor. She had left her purse in a locker back at the Milk-n-Bread and had sworn—again, on her grandmother ’s life—that she didn’t have a cell phone on her. We took her at her word; no one was going to search her.
    Nolan, Jeffrey, and I sat in the control room staring at one another . Their hair was wet and their faces looked ghostly in the studio’s dim light. Looking at Nolan now—running his hand through his hair, squeezing his eyes shut—I knew there was no plan. He’d asked for the ball because that had always been his instinct , and I’d given it to him because that had always been mine. But the game was already over.
    He opened his eyes and, seeing me, seemed to know what I was thinking. “She’d have gone to the police,” he said.
    “Of course she would’ve. But this is making things worse.”
    He ran a hand through his hair again, and asked Jeffrey the obvious : “What the fuck were you thinking?”
    Jeffrey shook his head. “I tried to tell you, I’m broke. And we were promising Will all that money at dinner. And I just … I don’t know. Panicked, I guess.”
    “Wow.” Nolan glared at him. “I mean, that really is the stupidest thing I ever heard. So how much did you steal?”
    Jeffrey reached into his front pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. We watched him count it. “A hundred and eighty dollars,” he said, not looking at either of us, and put the money back in his pocket.
    “You lose millions,” Nolan said, “and so you steal a hundred and eighty dollars and … you
took
somebody.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “I mean, how could you?”
    Jeffrey sighed. “It all happened so fast. Nobody else was in the store, just the two of us, and I know this might sound crazy but it just didn’t feel like that big of a
deal
until the second after she’d handed me the money. It didn’t even feel real. But then I pictured Sara and the baby, and the police coming after me, and … it just happened.” He glanced over in the girl’s direction, then away again. “I know that I did it, but it felt like an accident. Like I didn’t mean it at all. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    “Not even a little.” Nolan punched a fist into his palm. He used to do this in college during debates and later during his early campaign speeches. Since then, he’d learned to tame the gesture. “Robbery isn’t an accident. Kidnapping isn’t an accident. Nobody in the history of the world has ever kidnapped somebody by accident.”
    “Well, I did.”
    More hand punching. “Well, fuck you then.”
    “No, fuck you, Nolan. I didn’t intend—”
    “You didn’t intend what?”
    “I didn’t—”
    “You didn’t what?”
    “Let me
talk
! Okay? You never let me talk. Will you let me talk?”
    Rain drummed steadily on the roof. The building was well insulated and soundproofed, and I tried to remember if I’d ever heard police sirens from in here.
    “Well? Talk!”
    “Don’t rush me,” Jeffrey said.
    Nolan pulled his chair closer to Jeffrey’s. “Let me explain something . You and Will and I are in the deepest of shit. Do you understand ? You robbed a