CASE GUESSED THEIR crash space in the church basement was a storage room. Folding tables and chairs sat stacked along one wall. Hymnbooks and flyers about summer choir practices (now canceled, she assumed) lined another. The books and flyers had once been in cardboard boxes. She’d emptied and collapsed the boxes to give her and Fader something softer than the floor for sleeping.
Brooms and mops stood waiting beside one of the room’s two doors. The extra door was why she’d picked this room. She liked having two escape routes, and the room’s sole window was too small and high for a quick exit. Both doors locked from the inside, and she kept them locked when they were in the room.
They ate their meager dinner of apples, tomatoes, and bread, washed down with tap water from the basement washr
