The lengthy and uneventful drive into Charlotte was exactly how Regan liked to connect with someone who lived in the background. He had purposefully avoided the major highways with their digital tolls and traffic cameras, opting instead for the back roads. With the cultivated attentiveness of someone who understood what pursuit looked like, he looked in the rearview mirror every twenty minutes. After six hours of driving, they had not discovered any tails.
Lila sat next to him, looking through a fictitious passport that still had the smell of new laminate. As she viewed the document critically, she tilted it under the light, the morning sun catching in her hair. They had already left the safe house before dawn, heading to another makeshift shelter in their now-nomadic way of life.
As sh
