Reno

The Reno police moved fast once our detective sent them everything — the Sacramento file, the facility records, the wire transfers, Nora's statement about the visits. They didn't want to spook her into vanishing a third time.

They took her at the widowed father's front door, mid-interview, a folder of glowing fake references still in her hands.

I wasn't there for the arrest. Hannah and I heard about it secondhand, sitting at our own kitchen table with Nora doing homework three feet away, and it felt strange how anticlimactic it was — no confrontation, no last dramatic scene, just a phone call telling us a woman we'd spent months afraid of had been read her rights in a stranger's doorway in a city none of us had ever been to.

"They found receipts," our detective told us the next day. "A storage unit under yet another name. Documents on at least two more families going back nine years. Sacramento wasn't the first. You weren't the last one she was planning."

Roy surfaced separately, two states away, when a bank flagged an account he'd opened under his real name out of what the detective called "pure overconfidence." He tried to cut a deal immediately, offering testimony against Denise in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Denise's lawyer, when the case finally reached pretrial hearings, tried something we hadn't braced for.

He suggested Hannah hadn't been purely a victim at all — that she'd known more, agreed to more, at the very beginning, than she'd ever told me.

And watching Hannah's face when he said it, I realized, with a cold drop in my stomach, that he might not be entirely wrong.