Just today she handed out her phone number to a bunch of people she’s never met—and she told Jaycee her first and last name.

But I didn’t broadcast that stuff on the Web, she reminds herself. I just told a couple of friends, privately, over e-mail and the telephone. Nothing wrong with that.

No. But from now on she’ll be extra careful not to provide any identifying details on her own blog. And tomorrow she should go through it and delete anything she wouldn’t want to share with “opportunistic rapists and murderers,” as Rob put it.

Heck—maybe she should just stop blogging altogether.

Maybe it’s too dangerous.

Dangerous? Come on. You’re just being paranoid.

The inner voice, blustering bravado, is the one that popped up often back when she was sick, reminding her never to let fear get the best of her.

You’re going to keep blogging, because . . . because it’s what you do. And you’re going to stop worrying, because worry is a waste of energy. Get it? Got it? Good.

She rolls over, hoping to get some sleep at last.

The first-class cabin lights dimmed shortly after the flight took off from LAX.

Jaycee always gets a window seat on the red-eye so that she’ll have something to lean a pillow on, keeping her face turned away from the rest of the passengers. But this was a last minute trip, and an aisle was all they had left.

“Unless you want to fly coach?” Cory asked over the phone when he made her reservation.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“What do you think?”

“I haven’t flown coach in years, and you know it. Too risky.”

“Ah, but I so enjoy breaking your chops.”

So here she is, in first class, yes, but stuck in an aisle seat at midnight, numb with exhaustion after racing all over Los Angeles on just the few hours’ sleep she’d caught the night before. She would like nothing better than to close her eyes and wake up in New York, but knows from experience that she won’t be able to get comfortable enough to sleep.

Certainly not without the prescription sleeping pills Cory gets for her, which she mistakenly packed in the bag she checked.

Oh, well. She lands at five-something, and if she goes straight home to bed until noon, she’ll almost get a full night’s worth of beauty sleep.

Left with five hours to kill, she can either try to read a magazine, or she can use the in-flight WiFi to get online and see if there are any updates about Meredith. She’s had so little downtime today that she hasn’t had a chance to see what’s going on.

Jaycee takes her iPad out of her carry-on in the overhead bin and checks to see if anyone is paying any attention to her as she waits for it to power up.

The lucky businessman in the window seat beside her is huddled under a blanket, out cold, snoring softly, his head resting on a pillow wedged against the window. Across the aisle, a woman is similarly asleep against her own window, wearing a sleep mask—freebies here in first class on the red-eye. The woman’s seatmate appears completely absorbed in whatever he’s typing on his open laptop.

Good. The last thing she needs is some nosy fellow passenger snooping over her shoulder, trying to get a look at her screen.

She checks e-mail first.

She has several different accounts—a personal address, a business address, and one she uses for blogging. She usually doesn’t open that as often as the others, but today, because of Meredith, she’s been keeping an eye on it.

Since she last checked, Elena has responded to the e-mail BamaBelle sent this morning with her phone number and the link to the Cincinnati newspaper article about the murder. Elena sent a reply-all message expressing her sorrow over Meredith’s death and saying she’d be working late but would call Bama tonight.

To Jaycee, it sounds as if she’s trying to dodge having to make the phone call. She can certainly understand that—she herself had hesitated before making the call this morning. There were so many reasons not to cross that line from a strictly electronic relationship to more personal contact.

In the end, she concluded there were more reasons to call than to avoid it—primarily because the others might get suspicious if she didn’t, especially at a time like this. As long as she was careful not to give anything away, she decided, it would be fine.

And it was—for the most part. She managed to keep the conversation focused on Meredith and evade any sticky questions she sensed Bama was about to ask.

Like her real name. After Bama volunteered her own, Jaycee quickly changed the subject.

Not that anyone was likely to recognize her real real name, the one she’d been born with nearly forty years ago, in a tiny Minnesota town pretty much no one has ever heard of, not far from the border with Manitoba, Canada.

But still . . . you just never know. Which is why she hasn’t used it in ages.

Anyway—Landry Wells? With a name like that, no wonder she goes by a pseudonym. All anyone has to do is plug it into a search engine, along with Alabama . . .

Jaycee types it all in now, including her mother’s maiden name—Quackenbush—presses Enter, and finds herself looking at BamaBelle’s life story.

It’s basically all there, if you have time to sift through the results—and right now she has nothing but time. She peruses a wedding announcement, a real estate sale for an address in Point Clear, birth announcements for two children—Addison Landry Wells, who would be seventeen now, and Robert Tucker Wells IV, fifteen. There’s information about volunteer work and PTO posts, and there are pictures, too.

It’s not as though Jaycee doesn’t already know what BamaBelle looks like—she has a head shot on her blog. But it’s interesting to see her as a young bride, as a PTO mom, and, in a photo taken just last week, in the Mobile society pages at a charity ball with her husband and another couple identified as Robert Wells’s law partner John Sanderson and his wife Mercy.

She’s also been tagged here and there in candid shots on other people’s social networking pages. Landry Wells doesn’t have one of those herself; her Internet activity seems limited to her blog page—which, interestingly, does not come up on the search engine.

That means BamaBelle has done a good job of keeping her real self separate from her blogger identity. Not everyone is successful at that.

Meredith wasn’t.

But I certainly am.

The man beside Jaycee stirs in his sleep. Skittish, out of habit, she quickly closes the screen she was reading.

It’s just as well. Who cares who BamaBelle really is?

Who cares who I really am?

That’s the beauty of the Internet. There, you can be anyone you want to be. You can escape your real life.

That’s all Jaycee ever really wanted, from the time she was a little girl, abandoned by her unwed mother to be raised by grandparents who took her in out of duty, and nothing more.

She wanted to escape.

That’s why she used to hide in the shed behind the house, until she got so cold or hungry that she had to drag herself back inside to face reality—usually, with punishment for not answering when they called her name.

It’s why she looked forward to going to school every day, while her classmates complained and lived for the weekends.

And it’s why she discovered that she liked being on stage when her freshman drama teacher convinced her to audition for the high school musical. She could step into the spotlight, leave behind her real life with all its problems, and for a few hours, at least, become someone else—anyone else.

At seventeen she fell in love with Steven Petersen onstage—and off. That was the year everything happened: the year her grandmother died, the year she got pregnant, the year Steve broke her heart, and the year she gave up her newborn for adoption.