For one long second, I stood between the dead highway and Nathan Brooks’s open car door, feeling as if the world had narrowed to a single impossible choice.
Behind me, the desert stretched endlessly beneath a fading orange sky.
Ahead of me waited a black leather seat, cool air drifting out from the sedan, and a man whose name sounded like it belonged on buildings, contracts, and newspaper headlines.
“Mommy?” Lily whispered.
I looked down at her.
Her cheeks were pale from hunger. Her curls clung to her forehead from the heat. She was trying so hard not to complain.
Beside her, Noah stared at Nathan with the protective suspicion of a child who had spent too much time watching adults disappoint his mother.
The desert wind swept dust across the shoulder of the road.
I glanced behind me.
The sun had begun to drop, but the heat still pressed against the Arizona highway like a sentence being served.
My name is Emily Parker, and on that day, I had exactly forty-seven cents in my pocket.
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