EPILOGUE

Mallory would never read Charles’s note. She was already miles gone.

The window of her compartment was one of a hundred points of light which trumped the stars in their brilliance and speed. She was running along the iron rails, propelled by a powerful engine with no mercy for anything in its path, cutting a swath through the dark with the blinding brightness of the train’s electric eye.

Staring into the window glass, she recognized another woman’s face in her own reflection, a gentle presence floating beside her. Two suitcases sat by Mallory’s feet, but she carried no stitch of formal identification that would tie her to a name or a place. This was the way she had come to New York as a child, with only her wits and a bit of a mother’s blood on her hands. And this was the way she voyaged out again, out of New York City and into the great sprawling landscape of America, which was another country.