Excerpt from The Last Flight by Julie Clark, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"The new government technology is making it harder to make these," he'd said, the afternoon I'd driven out to see him. We were sitting at his dining room table in his large home on Long Island. He'd grown into a handsome man, with a wife and three kids. And bodyguards—­two posted at his gated driveway and another two at his front door. It occurred to me that Rory and Nico were not so different. Each of them the chosen son, pushed to carry the family into the twenty-first century, with new rules and regulations. Both expected to do more than the last generation—­or at the very least, not lose everything.

Nico slid a fat envelope toward me, and I opened it, pulling out a pristine Michigan driver's license and a passport with my face and the name Amanda Burns. I flipped through the rest—a social security card, a birth certificate, and a credit card.

"You'll be able to do anything with these," Nico said, picking up the driver's license and tilting it under the light so I could see the hologram embossed on the surface. "Vote. Pay taxes. Fill out a W-­2 form. This is high-level stuff, and my guy is the best. There's only one other person who can make a full package this good, and he lives in Miami." Nico handed me the credit card—a Citibank account with my new name on it. "Petra opened this last week, and the statements will be sent to her address. When you get settled, you can change it. Or toss this card and open a new one. Just be careful. You don't want someone to steal your identity."

He laughed at his joke, and I could see the boy he used to be flash across his face, sitting next to Petra and me at lunch, eating his sandwich while doing his math homework, the weight of who he was expected to become already bearing down on him.

"Thanks, Nico." I passed him the envelope containing ten thousand dollars, a small fraction of the money I'd managed to siphon off and squirrel away over the past six months. One hundred dollars here. Another two hundred there. Cash back whenever I could, slipping the money into Petra's gym locker every day so she could hold it until I was ready.

His expression grew serious. "I need you to know that if something goes wrong, I can't help you. Petra can't help you. Your husband has resources that would put me, my livelihood—­and Petra's—at risk."

"I understand," I told him. "You've done more than enough, and I'm grateful."

"I'm serious. All it takes is one tiny thread connecting your new life to your old one and it'll all fall apart." His dark eyes latched onto mine and held. "You can never go back. Not once. Not in any way, ever."

_______________

"Rory's scheduled the plane to leave around ten," I tell Petra now. "Did you remember to include my letter? I don't want to have to rewrite it on hotel stationery ten minutes before I leave."

She nods. "In with the rest of it. Addressed and stamped, ready to be mailed from Detroit. What did you say?"

I think about the hours I'd spent, the many versions I'd shredded, drafting a letter that would close the door on any possibility that Rory might try to follow me. "I told him I was leaving, and that this time, he would never find me. That he should announce our separation publicly, tell them it was amicable and that I was not going to be giving any public statements or media interviews about it."

"One week before he announces his run for Senate."

I give her a smirk. "Should I have waited until after?"

Once I'd saved enough money to carry me into a new life, I began to look for the perfect opening to leave. I studied our Google calendar of upcoming events, searching for a trip I'd be taking alone, focusing on cities near the Canadian or Mexican borders. I found it in the Detroit trip. I'm scheduled to visit Citizens of the World, a social justice charter school funded by the Cook Family Foundation. An afternoon school tour followed by an evening dinner with donors.

Excerpted from The Last Flight by Clare Clark. Copyright © 2020 by Clare Clark. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.