I could feel my entire body shaking, I was so angry with Roux. I saw Panda’s whole life as a picture, captured in this single moment. She hadn’t befriended Tate to propitiate her like a sex-volcano god. Panda was in love with her.

What an awful thing, to be so love-starved and to settle for so little. She and Francis were caught up together in a lifelong lie, and Roux had threatened to tell her very straitlaced family, maybe her church. Or maybe Roux had only threatened to tell Tate. That would do it, because now that I knew, it was obvious that Panda had hung her heart on the meager peg of Tate Bonasco’s shallow friendship.

“I’m paying it now,” Panda said. “Although how I’m going to buy groceries this month, I have no idea.”

I wondered then if Panda didn’t like me because she saw herself in me. I was excessively close with Char for my own reasons, but maybe, to Panda, my fierce protection of Charlotte acted as a mirror, and Panda didn’t want to look too deeply at herself. That I understood.

“Here, I’ll make it up to you,” Roux said. She was holding a sports bra, but she traded it for the phone. She pointed it at herself, but too low for a selfie, throwing her shoulders back and tightening the muscles in her toned abdomen. I heard the whir of the phone’s camera, and then she tapped at the screen. “Check your texts.” She waited a few seconds, until we both heard Panda’s shocked gasp. Then she said, “Hey, straight girl, are mine as nice as Tate’s?”

More silence. Panda had closed the connection. Roux chuckled, shaking her head, then tucked her phone into her purse. I watched, seething, as she put on the bra top. She did bend down and dig out a pair of the shoes that had been right by my face not five minutes ago. She carried them away, moving out of the room and down the hall at a fast clip.

The breath all came out of me, and I felt like half my bones had turned to air and leaked out with it. I was shaking with exhaustion, but I couldn’t relax. Not yet. She’d said that she was going to check the website. I eased down the hallway, quiet as I could, my back plastered against the wall. She was in the den. I could hear her clacking at the keys.

I checked my watch. I had half an hour, tops, before the DVD was over and the kids started wondering where I was. So far the only secrets I had learned were Panda’s.

Panda must have done as she was told, though, because Roux didn’t call her back. She made a soft, satisfied sound and stood up. A minute later she walked right past me, unseeing, and went out the door.

I ran to the computer even as she was locking up on the porch. I had to, before it could go dark again. I hoped to God that Roux hadn’t forgotten her gym pass or a bottled water. If she came back now, I would have no time to hide.

On the monitor I saw mostly games, but there was also MS Paint, a calculator, Office. I navigated through the doc files and found that there was literally one saved docx on the whole computer, labeled “Civics Paper.” Either the computer was as brand-spanking-new as it looked or Roux was letting Luca slack on homeschooling.

I opened it and scanned a few paragraphs. It was about the judicial branch, and it read like it had been stolen directly off Wikipedia. The mom in me reacted, wondering if Roux knew how to check with those antiplagiarism sites, and then I blinked and shook my head, almost laughing at myself. This was Roux, amoral as a feral cat; she’d just as likely be teaching her kid how to cheat better so he could beat those programs when he went to college. This really did seem to be Luca’s computer, though I knew from my eavesdropping that Roux at least used it to surf the Internet.

Time was leaking away, but I took another precious minute to check the browser history. Like every parent with a teenager, I knew how. I found Airbnb, of course; she’d just checked the Sprite House listing. Before that, Roux had been Googling tropical places, reading up on countries with good coastlines, low cost of living, and no extradition treaties. She’d bookmarked seven sites with information about the Maldives.

My heart jumped. I was right. She was running from the law—she must be. Some client or another had been braver than I was and pressed charges. There was a warrant somewhere, probably with serious time attached. I needed her real name, and I would have her.

But where would she keep such a thing? I scrubbed at my eyes. They felt sandy with exhaustion. She must have a safe-deposit box, or she had simply outthought me. She’d said I was like her, but I couldn’t guess her hiding place. Well, I was new at this, and she’d been playing her games for years. Her whole life was nothing but games. Other people were nothing more than playing pieces.

As soon as I thought it, I knew.

I knew exactly where I would find what I needed. I knew it as sure as if Roux herself had leaned in close and whispered it into my ear.

I got up and went to the shelves by the fireplace. A few books rested there, grocery-store bodice rippers and thrillers, the covers tattered from many hands. Perfect vacation reading, they were standard fare for rental houses. Two shelves under that, on the very bottom, another rental-house staple: a stack of board games.

I knelt down beside them.

The fat, square Yahtzee box sat on top of longer, narrow boxes that held Scrabble and Clue and Monopoly. And there, between them, the one I wanted. The game that had to be Roux’s favorite. Risk.

I lifted Yahtzee with one hand to slide Risk out, but it felt way too heavy. I set Risk aside and pulled the Yahtzee box into my lap. A weighty object slid and thunked as I shifted it.

I opened it, and my heart stuttered. No dice cups, no score pads. The only thing in the box was a snub-nosed revolver, thick, black, oiled to a dull sheen. The name Ruger ran vertically down its short barrel. A box of bullets snuggled in beside it; it wasn’t just for show.

I reached for it, wanting to see if it was loaded, then pulled my hand back. I shouldn’t touch it. I had no idea how or even if Roux had ever used it, but I didn’t want any trace of me—a fingerprint, a cell, a hair—clinging to it.

And anyway, I already knew that the chambers would be full. I felt it as an instinct. She would keep it locked and loaded, oiled and ready. Roux played for keeps.

It was a simple machine, and it had no safety that I could see. I vaguely remembered knowing that most revolvers didn’t have them. That was like her, too, though it seemed insane to put nothing but a flimsy cardboard box between a sixteen-year-old boy and a gun.

Jesus, but I wanted out of here. I wanted to go home, scrub and scrub my hands, peel my sweater off and burn it, and stand under a boiling shower. Then I would abdicate. I was in over my head. Roux had a gun.

She must have a reason. That reason might be stashed in another of these boxes. I didn’t want to know, and yet I had to know. I had to know to win Roux’s game, and I wanted to win now for more than me. For Panda, who was still caught in it, and for every other person she was twisting and wringing. I wanted to win all the way. To keep my secrets, keep my money, make her crawl away. I couldn’t leave with that Risk box right there in front of me.

I opened the lid.

The first thing I saw was the money. Two neat, thick bundles of twenty-dollar bills in bands. More bands littered the box, broken. If this was all her cash reserve, she was running close to empty.

The other half of the box’s contents was both more jumbled and more eclectic. I saw a stack of passports and grabbed the first one, flipped it open. Roux smiled out at me from the picture. The name was Ange Renault, just as she’d told Tig. Was that her real name? I checked the birth date, did quick math. If this was her actual ID, then Roux was thirty-seven. I flipped the next one open, and there was a red-haired, unsmiling Roux with the name Angela Lawry. This was the least romantic of all her names, but I knew it wasn’t real because the birth date made her twenty-eight. I heard myself whispering out loud, “Bitch, please.”

There were still two more, and these both looked brand-spanking-new. I flipped them open and found a blond Roux with the name Angelica Roux, thirty-four, and a matching one for Luca. In this shot he was blond, too. The dye job or the wig washed him out and made him look somehow younger, like a sad, pale rabbit.

I got my phone out and quickly took pictures of the box itself, the money and multiple passports, and then one of each passport open to the first page. I would Google the names and birth dates and addresses later.

I turned my attention to a dark green box, the hinged kind with a velvet outside. Inside, a fat diamond tennis bracelet jingled against engagement rings, at least four of them, and a pair of sapphire earrings. I took a picture of these things, too.