“I think so,” she said. “Like in the movies?”

“It’s not an automatic that you and your daughter would be accepted, but in a case like this, where your testimony is crucial, and where others who might be later convicted of criminal activity remain free, we can certainly talk to the right people about it, and see where we are. I think that’s something we should do. Do you agree with that, Mrs. Giordano?” He looked at Sherri intently and also indulgently, like she was a child, and he was offering her an ice cream. Somehow he managed not to blink as he waited for her to answer. He waited a very long time.

Finally: “Yes,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. “Yes, please. I’d like to hear more.”

There were no cameras allowed in the courtroom; all media was banned. But they couldn’t ban the defendants from the courtroom—they couldn’t ban Bobby from seeing his wife, from hearing everything she had to say. They couldn’t ban Sherri’s heart from breaking anew at the start of each of the eleven days. Four defendants, one trial. Four convictions, four sentences. One protected government witness.

And then Sharon and Katie Giordano disappeared forever and ever.

What Sherri remembered most about the time they spent preparing for their new lives was the bathroom in the room that she and Katie shared, in a dingy motel in an “undisclosed location.” She couldn’t disclose it now even if she wanted to because she didn’t know where it was.

All these motels look the same: a rutted parking lot, a row of doors with two plastic chairs set outside each, a front office that smelled like old French fries, a chain-link fence surrounding an underutilized pool. The toilet ran unless you jiggled the handle, and there was a rust stain in the tub. Bobby would never, ever, ever have taken Sherri to a motel like this. Or any motel.

Sometimes, when Katie was sleeping, Sherri went into the terrible bathroom and sat on the toilet seat and looked at the rust stain in the tub and cried and cried for everything they’d lost.

They lost so much. The money, of course. Their social security numbers. They got new ones, but they were hard to memorize and Sherri still had to look hers up anytime she needed them. Their last name, although Katie got to keep her first name and they both retained the G from their last names. They altered Katie’s school records to reflect attendance at a different school, essentially rewriting her past.

In the motel room they made Katie write her new name again and again and again. Katie Griffin Katie Griffin Katie Griffin. Sherri practiced hers too. Slipups could be deadly. They role-played meeting new people and introducing themselves. They practiced what was called “cocktail party conversation.”

What Sherri was supposed to say at a cocktail party was that she and Katie moved from Ohio after a nasty divorce. Then she was supposed to gracefully change the subject, but if anybody pressed her she had the details ready to go. (Columbus; Bobby took up with a woman at his office; they lived in a neighborhood called Livingston Park on a street called Carpenter Street; their house was made of redbrick.)

During those hours and days and weeks in the motel they wrapped their minds around the fact that they were taking nothing from their old lives with them, not the photo album from Bobby and Sherri’s wedding, not the phenomenal drawing of a dinosaur that Katie did in second grade that Sherri had framed and hung in the kitchen near her calendar. Not the calendar either. They simply walked away from everything.

And when all was said and done they landed in Newburyport, Massachusetts, this pretty little town on the sea, with pretty little girls with their colorful surfboards and pretty mothers who had sharp serpent tongues.

41.

Alexa

Direct Message from @jt76 to @silkstockings via Instagram: If you’re looking for a place to stay when you come to L.A. I know a great Realtor. This will all make sense once you know the whole story! I promise!

@silkstockings to @jt76: (no reply)

Cam texted Alexa two days after Canobie Lake.

Can you go out with me tonight? I’ll buy dinner.

She was at work, off at four. Definitely, she texted back. Where? (She needed the context to figure out the right outfit.)

She wondered if Cam might take her to Brine. Their menu was supposed to be fantastic this summer, and over the past two years Alexa had acquired a taste for oysters, something she’d never liked as a kid. She figured if she was going to live in L.A. in the not-too-distant future, if she was going to have the kind of life where people have, like, caviar and champagne for a midmorning snack, she’d better start getting used to the finer things. Next on her list were fois gras and dishes involving truffle oil. If they were going to Brine she was definitely going to have the bacon-and-egg fried oysters. And wear her new Halston dress.

Sylvan Street, came the reply.

Sylvan Street? Alexa deflated. For real? Sylvan Street was the chain restaurant out by the movie theater in Salisbury. It was the restaurant Morgan used to pick to go to on her birthday because she liked the Potachoes, which were potato skins that had been recklessly bred with nachos, but even Morgan had tired of the Potachoes and had started choosing Oregano Pizzeria downtown instead.

Ok, she texted back. Whatever, she thought. She waited for him to tell her he would pick her up, but the next text caused her to deflate even more.

6:30. See you there.