Cooper Mall

You have kids.

You struggle with bills.

You change jobs.

You suffer losses.

You celebrate the wins.

It is the slow, uneven rhythm of becoming a person.

Tanya lived all that too, but she lived it with a secret that sat right behind her rib cage.

She lived three decades of milestones knowing her past could find her at any second.

To survive it, Tanya ended up making a set of principles for herself, some rules to live by.

She never wrote them down, but her rules were etched into how she moved through the world.

When we last left, Margo, she jumped on a train in Baltimore, narrowly missing the FBI, who'd just caught up with Faye Copeland, the woman she escaped with.

The train took her as far north as it could go, a notch in the Rust Belt, Akron, Ohio.

She arrived with nothing but a couple of bags and the hope that the next stranger might be safe to trust.

That woman she barely knew from selling encyclopedias, the one Tanya shared her plan to get back to Ohio with, made good on her offer.

She'd arranged for her parents to meet Margo at the station,

Warm food, a full stomach.

It was the closest she had come to comfort in months.

Almost as soon as she got to Akron, she moved west to Ashland, where there were more opportunities to earn a living.

But starting over required more than just money.

Margo needed a past no one could trace, a future built clean.