stillness. Farther into the desert, a coyote gave a shrill yip.
The unit numbers were painted on the doors in bright orange, starting with 100. Emma counted out loud as they walked through the aisles. “One hundred fifty,” she whispered. “Two hundred . . . three hundred
. . . three fifty—it should be down here, Ethan.” She jerked her head around a corner.
Unit 356 looked like all the others, the numbers stenciled across the folding leaves in the garage-type door. Emma had leaned down to fumble at the padlock when Ethan grabbed her elbow.
“Wait,” he said, handing her a pair of knit pink gloves, which no doubt belonged to his mother, from one of the pockets in his cargo pants. From another he extracted a pair of black climbing gloves and
pulled them over his own fingers.
“Good call,” Emma said, tugging on her gloves and grasping the padlock once more. The key was a perfect fit. With an almost inaudible click, the latch sprang free. Emma gripped the door’s handle—and
pulled sharply up.
The inside was completely dark. She groped along the wall to find the switch, and a single fluorescent bulb hanging in the center of the unit flickered to life. The unit was large enough to hold an apartment
’s worth of furniture or a few hundred boxes—but it was almost completely empty.
Almost.
In the center of the cavernous space, a single manila envelope lay on the floor just under the light. Next to it was a stuffed octopus missing one of its black button eyes. Emma knew that octopus. She’d
hugged those blue knit legs countless times as a little girl, whenever she needed comfort. It was her Socktopus, one of the only things she’d brought with her from Vegas.
She slowly walked forward, picking up the stuffed animal and staring down at it. Socktopus had been in the duffel that was stolen from the bench in Sabino Canyon, her first night in Tucson. Whoever took it
had acted quickly—it had only been unattended for a few minutes before she’d returned looking for it.
Ethan hung back, glancing at the open door every now and then as if afraid someone would spring out at them. “What is that?” he asked, frowning.
“My mom got it for me,” she said. Her voice sounded far away, even to her. “When I was little.”
For a moment the dingy storage unit faded, and she could feel Becky tying two of the octopus’s arms around Emma’s neck in the store so it hung down on her back like a cape. So he can protect you, Becky had
explained, a rare smile lighting up her pretty face.
Emma blinked away her tears, and the dusty unit came back into focus. She tucked Socktopus under her arm, leaning down to pick up the envelope. For a moment she fumbled at the brad that held it closed, her
fingers wooden and clumsy through the gloves. Then a pile of papers and photos slid out in one large stack. On top was a disc in a clear jewel case, labeled SUTTON IN AZ in red Sharpie.
“The video,” Ethan whispered.
She nodded, but she was already rifling through the pages behind the disc. There was a printout of the very first message Emma had sent Sutton. This will sound crazy, but I think we’re related. We look
exactly the same, and we have the same birthday. Behind that was a page with Sutton’s e-mail and Facebook passwords. And behind that were photos—a thick stack of glossy black-and-white photos.
Emma had gotten so used to seeing Sutton’s face everywhere that for a moment, she thought the pictures were of her twin. But that wasn’t right—in the very top picture, the girl stood behind a ticket
window. Emma’s heart skipped a beat. It was the New York–New York roller coaster in Vegas, where she’d worked the summer before coming to Tucson. In the picture she was busy counting change for a customer,
completely unaware that someone had a lens trained on her.
The next picture caught her and Alex, running side by side on a trail through Red Rock Canyon. Another showed her reaching up to pull something off the top shelf at the public library. In a third she was
walking into Clarice’s house, an expression of utter despondence on her face. The photos were grainy, taken surreptitiously and at awkward angles—but she was clear in all of them.
The old Emma had been an expert at staying anonymous and invisible, at keeping low to the ground so she couldn’t get hurt. The old Emma would have been embarrassed to realize that someone had been watching
her all that time.
But the new Emma? The new Emma was pissed.
And so was I.
Emma shuffled the pictures to the back of the stack of paperwork, and leafed through the rest of the pages. She frowned at one that was simply a list of numbers. For a moment she didn’t know what she was
looking at. Then she recognized one of the numbers.
It was the Mercers’ alarm code.
Her jaw dropped. Beneath that code was the Chamberlains’. And below that was another set of digits she recognized: 0907.