And so they split. Rob, Carol, Lily, and Tommy spent the day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Lily stood in front of a Monet so long that a security guard asked if she was feeling all right. They visited Independence Hall, walked through Old City, and ended the evening at Pat's King of Steaks on 9th and Passyunk, where Lily ate a cheesesteak the size of her forearm and declared it the greatest culinary achievement in human history.
Tommy said it was fine. Carol said it was a little greasy. Rob said nothing because he was on his second one.
The others - twelve of them - went shopping, then clubbing. The plan was to hit the nightlife on 2nd Street, which someone had said had the best clubs in the city. The young ones were excited. The parents were indulgent. The evening stretched ahead like a promise.
They got back to the hotel at eleven p.m.
Without the girls.
Lily was brushing her teeth when the pounding started on the door. She opened it to find Greg Davis in the hallway, his face the color of old paper, a bruise blooming on his cheekbone.
"Get your parents," he said. "Now."
Five minutes later, sixteen people minus four became twelve in the Bennetts' room, and the story came out in ragged, overlapping fragments that Lily had to piece together like a jigsaw puzzle thrown at a wall.
They'd gone to a club on 2nd Street. A high-end place - crystal chandeliers, leather booths, a bouncer the size of a refrigerator. Inside, the music was loud and the drinks were strong, and Kyle and Jake had done what young men with too much alcohol and too little sense inevitably do: they'd noticed a group of men at a nearby table staring at the girls.
"They were just looking," Karen wailed, mascara streaking down her cheeks. "The girls are pretty. Men look. It's normal. But those idiots-" she jabbed a finger at Kyle and Jake, who had matching black eyes and the hunched posture of dogs who'd been caught eating shoes - "those idiots had to start something."
Kyle's voice was barely a whisper. "They were touching Brittany. I told them to back off."
"And then you threw a punch," Greg said flatly.
"He grabbed her arm!"
The brawl that followed was short, violent, and one-sided. The men at the other table were not ordinary club-goers. They were soldiers of the Rocchetti crime family, and their boss - Giacomo Rocchetti - was sitting in the VIP section with his girlfriend when a flying glass caught her across the cheek, leaving a bloody scratch.
That was when everything changed.
More men appeared. A dozen, then twenty. The Bennetts and Prices and Davises were beaten down in minutes. And then Rocchetti himself came down from VIP, blood on his girlfriend's face, fury in his eyes, and pointed at the four girls.
"Those," he said, pointing to the four girls. "For my trouble."
"You can't-" Frank had started to say, and one of Rocchetti's men had hit him across the face with something hard enough to split his lip.
They were taken. Just like that. Brittany, Jessica, Rachel, Emily - dragged out of the club and into black SUVs while their fathers lay bleeding on the dance floor and their mothers screamed into the thumping bass of music that never stopped playing. The club staff watched and said nothing. The other patrons watched and said nothing. The bouncer at the door watched and said nothing.
Because in this part of Philadelphia, when Giacomo Rocchetti took something, it stayed taken.
Karen hadn't stopped crying since they got back to the hotel. Her sobs were the kind that came from somewhere deep and primal - not grief exactly, but the specific horror of a mother who knows her children are in danger and can do nothing about it. Linda was quieter, but her hands shook so badly she couldn't hold a glass of water. Diane sat rigid in a chair, her face blank with shock, as if her mind had decided that the best way to handle this particular reality was to simply refuse to process it.
The boys - Kyle, Jake, and Tommy - stood in a cluster near the window. Kyle's right eye was swollen shut. Jake had blood crusted in his hair. Tommy, who hadn't been at the club, who'd been back at the hotel playing games on his phone like any normal fifteen-year-old, looked at the bruises on his cousins' faces and understood for the first time that the world contained a kind of violence that could not be solved by calling 911.
Rob stood beside the door with his arms crossed, his factory-foreman face on - the expression he wore when a machine broke down and someone needed to figure out, calmly and methodically, how to fix it.
Lily stood in the middle of the room with her toothbrush still in her hand and toothpaste drying on her chin.
"Call the police," she said.
The silence that followed was worse than the story.
"We can't," Dan said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. "The people at the club - the other patrons, the staff - they warned us. Rocchetti has people inside the police department. If we report this, the girls are dead."
"That's insane."
"This is Philadelphia." Greg's voice was hollow. "It's not Bethlehem."
The next hour was the worst of Lily's life. Not because of the crying - though Karen's sobs were enough to crack stone - but because of the hopelessness. The sheer, suffocating weight of having no options.