Chapter 4

That night, Nadia did not sleep.

She lay in her bed with the bedside lamp on, the beige folder — Mr. Bledsoe had made a copy of the original page before he left, and she had put the copy in her tote — on the nightstand where she could see it from her pillow. The house was quiet. The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked, and then fell silent.

Melia was asleep in the next room, her yellow raincoat hanging on the hook by the door, her backpack on the floor beside the bed. She had not asked any questions at dinner. She had eaten her macaroni and cheese, drawn a picture of a house with a big yellow sun, and gone to bed at her usual time, carrying her usual calmness like a shield.

At two in the morning, Nadia's phone buzzed.

She picked it up. The screen read: *Unknown Number.*

She let it go to voicemail.

At two oh seven, a text message arrived from the same number, a gibberish string of numbers and letters that might have been a wrong pin or a glitch or something else entirely. Nadia stared at it for a full minute before the pattern resolved itself. She had spent a year reading case files, court transcripts, visitation logs. She had developed an eye for the shape of official documents.

The numbers and letters arranged themselves into a date. A time. A meeting room number.

The guardian ad litem's office.

Someone was telling her that the meeting tomorrow had been moved. Moved from the courthouse to a different building. A building with a name she did not recognize, but which she recognized anyway as the kind of place where files went to disappear.

She did not respond to the text. She could not have explained why she was sure it was from Corinne's camp, gate following gate in the dark, and why she was equally sure that responding would be the wrong move. At two seventeen, she got up, walked to the kitchen, and made herself a cup of tea. She stood at the window while the kettle boiled, looking at the dark street, and she ran through everything she knew.