Washington was her home, not this Central Texas town she’d failed so miserably to appreciate, but she remembered that the church sat on the edge of an old residential neighborhood. If her legs could carry her across the alley and behind the houses on the other side, she might be able to get to one of those side streets without anyone seeing her.

And then what? This wasn’t a well-planned escape like the one Nealy had pulled off from the White House all those years ago. It wasn’t an escape at all. It was an interruption. A suspension. She needed to find a place where she could get her breath back, pull herself together. A child’s empty playhouse. A hidden nook in someone’s backyard. Someplace away from the chaos of the press, from her betrayed bridegroom and bewildered family. A temporary hideout where she could remember who she was and what she owed the people who’d taken her in.

Oh God, what had she done?

A commotion on the other side of the church caught the guards’ attention. She didn’t wait to see what it was. Instead she stumbled around the end of the cinder-block wall, rushed across the alley, and crouched behind a Dumpster. Her knees were shaking so badly she had to brace herself against the side of the rusty metal bin. It exuded the fetid stench of garbage. There were no cries of alarm, only the distant noise of the crowd packing the bleachers that had been set up in front of the church.

She heard a thin cry, like a kitten’s mew, and realized it was coming from her. She made herself creep along the row of shrubs that separated the old Victorians. The shrubs ended at a brick-paved street. She rushed across it and into someone’s backyard.