The timid single mother let a stranger pull her head gently onto his shoulder mid-flight, because the woman marching down the aisle had already lifted her camera.
“Close your eyes,” the man whispered.
“Act like you know me.”
Mara Quinn should have pulled away.
She should have tightened both arms around her sleeping son, asked the flight attendant for help, and reminded herself that a calm voice and a beautiful coat did not make a man safe.
She had learned that lesson the expensive way.
Some men sounded kindest right before they took the most.
But Leo had finally stopped crying.
His little body was warm and heavy in her lap, his cheek pressed to the collar of her sweater.
Mara’s shoulders ached.
Her eyes burned from the kind of exhaustion sleep could not repair.
And the blonde woman moving toward them from the front of the plane was not walking like a passenger returning from the restroom.
She was walking like someone who had discovered a secret and already knew how to sell it.
Her phone was raised just below her chin.
So Mara closed her eyes.
The stranger beside her shifted with careful restraint, giving her just enough space to rest her temple against his shoulder.
His jacket smelled faintly of rain and cedar, a clean scent that made her think of hotel lobbies and old libraries.
“Good,” he murmured.
“Stay like that.”
Mara kept her breathing slow.
She felt absurd.
She felt frightened.
She felt, for the first time in months, like she had stepped into someone else’s danger instead of drowning in her own.
By the time the aircraft rose above the dark weather over Washington and broke into a field of moonlit clouds, the pretend sleep had become real.
Three hours earlier, Mara had stood at Gate B14 in Spokane International Airport with one suitcase at her feet, a diaper bag slipping down her arm, and a one-way boarding pass folded inside her coat pocket.
She had checked the ticket six times.
Spokane to Boston, with a late connection she prayed Leo would sleep through.
A fresh start, her cousin Nina had called it.
Mara did not call it that yet.
A fresh start sounded clean.
Hopeful.
Like something chosen by a woman who had options.
What Mara had was an old stroller, three hundred and eighty dollars hidden in the lining of Leo’s blanket bag, and a bruise-colored fear that Daniel would realize she had left before the plane took off.
The man behind her in line sighed so loudly that the woman in front of Mara glanced back.
“Some people really bring babies on evening flights,” he said.
Mara looked down at Leo.
He was asleep against her chest, his lashes damp from the crying fit he had finally surrendered to near the vending machines.
“I know, sweetheart,” Mara whispered into his hair.
“We are almost there.”
They were not.
They were not almost anywhere.
They were leaving behind the narrow townhouse where Daniel had begun locking his office door after Mara found the bank statements.
They were leaving behind the marriage counselor Daniel had charmed so thoroughly that Mara had apologized for crying too much.
They were leaving behind a mother-in-law who had looked at Leo’s packed bag and said, with soft
