The pharmacy sign at the corner of Doyle Avenue reads 18° and, underneath it, the date, which I already knew but which lands in my chest anyway when I see it printed in amber pixels: JAN 3.

Four years. Four years to the day since I stood in a doorway with a duffel bag and told a man named Trevor Lang that I was leaving and meant it this time.

I do the arithmetic on the walk over, the way you press a bruise to check if it still hurts. It still hurts, just differently than it used to — less like a wound and more like weather, something that happens to the sky every January whether I want it to or not.

Dominic left before seven, Bruno already idling at the curb, both of them headed to Fall River to run down whatever eleven seconds of Nunzio's voice did to his face at midnight. He didn't ask if I wanted to come. I didn't offer. There's a version of us where that would have hurt my feelings and today isn't that version — today I wanted the walk, the cold, the being alone in a body that answers to nobody's schedule but mine.

My apartment key still works, which surprises me a little every time. Like the door ought to know how long I've been gone and refuse me on principle.

Inside, the air is the specific cold of a room that has given up. I've had the thermostat parked at fifty since the first of December, just enough to keep the pipes from splitting, and the radiators, when I crank the valve, answer with three loud bangs and then a long, sulking silence, like they resent being asked.

I go looking for the plants first. I always do. It's a habit now, checking them the way you'd check on someone you left in a hospital bed — guiltily, expecting the worst, hoping to be told you worried for nothing.

I wasn't wrong to worry.

Twenty-two of them are dead. Not dramatically — no black stalks, no obvious rot — just quietly gone, leaves gone the grey-brown of wet newspaper, soil pulled away from the pot edges in a shrunken ring. I count them standing in the middle of my own kitchen with my coat still zipped to the throat, and by the time I get to twenty I have to put my hand flat on the counter to steady myself, which is an absurd thing to need steadying for. They're plants. I bought most of them for four dollars at a hardware store. But I turned nine or ten of them a quarter turn every Saturday for nearly four years so they'd grow even and straight instead of leaning toward whatever window they could find, and now nineteen of them are alive because Bruno moved the important ones to Federal Hill and the rest just — stopped. Because I wasn't here to turn them.

I don't cry over the plants. I want to be clear about that, mostly to myself. I stand very still and let something move through my chest that isn't crying, exactly, more like the ache of a tooth you've been avoiding chewing on, and then I go put my coat back on properly because the apartment isn't going to warm up in the next ten minutes no matter how hard I want it to.

I sit down on the mattress. Still on the floor, still no frame, four years running now, and I pull my knees up and sit there in my coat in a room with no radiators that work and no man due home in six hours asking where I've been, and something in my ribs just — lets go.

Nobody is coming.

That's the whole thought. Nobody is coming through that door in the next hour, or the next four, and I don't have to have a face ready for them, and I don't have to have dinner ready or an answer ready or a version of myself ready that can survive being looked at. I sit on a bare mattress in an unheated apartment with dead plants around me like a little graveyard and I feel, for about ninety seconds, something that can only honestly be called relief.

And then I notice that I'm relieved, and that noticing is its own kind of cold, colder than the room. Because I thought I was happy at Federal Hill. I have told myself I'm happy at Federal Hill, in the sense that you tell yourself things while brushing your teeth, fast and unexamined. And here I am getting real, physical relief out of an empty room with no one in it, and I don't know what that says about the room I've been sleeping in for five weeks, except that it says something, and I don't want to finish the sentence out loud even in my own head.

I get up before I can finish it anyway.

The fire escape is where I go when a thought gets too big for the room. I've painted out there for fifteen years, through every landlord, every boyfriend, every version of myself that couldn't afford real canvas and used the black iron grate instead, propping the pad against my knees. I take my father's cigar box down from the shelf — four brushes, one fan brush older than I am by five years, the ferrule gone dull with age — and I go out into eighteen degrees in my coat and gloves with the fingers cut off, and I paint.

Forty minutes, more or less. Long enough that my breath fogs the water in the jar I use to rinse the brushes, and I have to break the skin of ice on it twice with the brush handle. Long enough that the scar across my right palm — six weeks old now, from a torn strip of alley flashing, from a night I don't let myself replay in daylight — starts to stiffen in the cold, the seam of it pulling tight enough that I switch the brush to my left hand and keep going clumsy-handed rather than stop. My father painted houses for a living and taught himself to sketch on butcher paper on his lunch break, and some nights out here I can still feel him over my shoulder, not sad, just present, the way weather is present. Ten years and seven months gone and he still shows up on a fire escape in January like he never left.

I'm packing the brushes away, fingers half-numb, when I hear the knock downstairs — three sharp raps, a familiar rhythm.

Mr. Pariseau. Grey cardigan, reading glasses pushed up into thinning hair, a clipboard he doesn't need because he's been doing this so long the numbers live in his head.

"January's due," he says, by way of hello.

"It's paid through June," I tell him, which is true, and which I say carefully, watching his face.

He nods like this is not news. "I know. Fella came by in November. Paid it in an envelope, cash, said keep the lights running so it looks lived-in." A small shrug, like this is a normal thing landlords hear. "Didn't leave a name. Didn't need to."

I hold my face very still. "Right," I say. "Thank you."

He looks at me a beat longer than the conversation requires, like he might ask something else, and then decides against it, the way people who've been renting to strangers for thirty years learn to decide against most things. He goes back down the stairs and I stand in the cold hallway a moment longer, feeling the specific chill of being known about by a stranger in an envelope, before I let myself back inside.

That's when I start noticing the wrongnesses.

Small ones, first. My laptop is on the desk where I left it in December, but it's shut, lid all the way down, and I never shut it — I always leave it cracked an inch, an old habit from a life where a fully-closed laptop meant somebody had touched it. I stand over it for a second before I open it again, and it wakes to the same background I left, the same dead battery icon, nothing obviously different. Which doesn't mean nothing happened. It means whoever did it was careful.

In the bathroom, the cabinet over the sink — I keep it a specific kind of mess, glycerin hand cream on its side, an old prescription bottle turned label-out, a hair tie looped over the aspirin — and none of that is how I left it. It's neater. Squared. The way a person straightens a room they've searched, putting everything back approximately where it goes and getting the approximation almost right, except I know my own mess too well to be fooled by almost.

The bathtub against the kitchen wall, the one I've had since I signed this lease, has a skin of dust on its enamel edge from disuse — except for one clean patch, elbow-width, at the corner nearest the window, like someone leaned there. Like someone stood at my tub, at my window, and rested their weight a while.

On the desk, my sketchbook — which I leave splayed open, spine cracked, always, because I hate books that snap shut on me — is squared flush to the table edge. Corners aligned. The way Teresa squares her folders. The way Dominic leaves a file out on a desk, corners perfect, as its own kind of sentence.

And there it is — the first name that comes to me, fast and ugly and almost a relief in its own wrong way: Dominic. He counts things. He squares things. He pays rent in cash envelopes and doesn't leave his name because he doesn't need to. For one whole breath I stand in my own kitchen and let myself believe it might be him, because believing that is so much easier than the alternative, and the ease of it frightens me more than the fact itself — that I would rather my apartment have been searched by a man who's told me he plans to kill his father than by the one who used to time how I chewed.

I go looking for more evidence of him, almost hoping to find it.

I find the opposite.

The drawer under the microwave — takeout menus gone soft at the corners, a rubber-banded fistful of dead pens, a church key I've never used — holds, tucked at the back where I never look, a small paper tag. Boston. A dry cleaner's claim ticket, printed, a name and number I don't recognize, the kind of tag that gets stapled to a garment bag and clipped off before delivery. I have never used a Boston dry cleaner in my life.

And underneath the cold, so faint I almost miss it, so faint I have to stand still and actually hunt for it with my whole face turned up like a dog — eucalyptus. Not a candle. Not anything I own. A cologne, a deodorant, something worn on skin and left behind in a closed room the way smoke stays in a coat.

I know that smell. I spent four years falling asleep next to that smell.

I sit down on the kitchen floor next to the tub because my legs decide to do that before I've agreed to it, and I put my back against the cold porcelain and I do the math the way I've been doing math all day, except this time it isn't a nice number like four years, it's a number with teeth in it: four months. Four months since I pulled a blue-taped tracker out of my own wheel well and understood, standing on Doyle Avenue with grease on my fingers, that Trevor had been watching my car since roughly the month I signed this lease.

I assumed the car was the whole of it. A magnet, a battery, a location pin blinking on some screen in Boston — invasive, sure, criminal, probably, but external. A thing bolted to the outside of my life.

It has never once occurred to me, in four months of being furious about a tracker in a wheel well, that he might also have been inside. That the same patience that fixed a router cord into a neat blue tab could just as easily let itself into an apartment, put everything back close enough to right, and let itself back out again, leaving nothing behind but a smell and a shut laptop and a dry cleaner's tag from a city he still lives in.

The cold from the tub's edge climbs up through my coat into my spine and I let it, because it's the only honest thing in the room right now.

I think, in order, very fast: call the police. And immediately, right behind it: and tell them what — that my ex-boyfriend, an FBI agent, may have entered my apartment without forced entry and left nothing missing, based on a smell and a shut laptop? They'll want a report number and a broken lock and I have neither. I think: get a lawyer. And right behind that: with what money, because Rita's bakery account nets me six hundred dollars a month and I have exactly enough for gas and a dentist appointment I keep not booking.

And then I think about telling Dominic, and that thought stops dead the way a car stops when something runs out in front of it.

Because if I tell Dominic that a federal agent let himself into my apartment, straightened my bathroom cabinet, and left a Boston dry-cleaning tag in my kitchen drawer, I am not telling him a fact. I am handing him a reason. And I have watched, now, in an alley behind a cafe, exactly what Dominic Russo does with a reason.

I sit with that a long moment — the specific, awful arithmetic of loving a man whose response to someone touched what's mine has a body count already attached to it — and something old wakes up in my chest, my father's habit, and I find myself doing it without deciding to: counting the ways out of my own building. Uno, la porta della strada — the street door, three flights down, sticks in cold weather. Due, il carico — the fire escape, iron, fifteen years of my own paint on the rail. Tre — and there I lose it, same as always, same as every single time since I was nineteen, the number sliding away from me right when I need it most, except today the losing of it doesn't feel like a childhood tic. It feels like a warning that I only have two ways out of a room I used to think was the safest one I had.

I don't call anyone. I don't touch the drawer again, don't move the dry cleaner's tag, don't wipe down the cabinet or refold anything back to its true chaos, because some instinct older than fear tells me to leave it exactly as I found it — a scene, not a mess, evidence I don't yet know what to do with but which I am not going to destroy by tidying my own tidying.

I take the drawings I made on the fire escape, still tacky in places, and I roll them loosely so the paint won't crack. I take my father's cigar box of brushes. I leave the nineteen living plants where they are, and before I go, I turn the thermostat back up past fifty — sixty-five, sixty-eight, high enough that the radiators bang their three angry bangs and then, grudgingly, start to tick — because whatever else is true, I'm not going to let the ones that survived go the way of the twenty-two that didn't. Somebody should get to keep living in this apartment even if it isn't safely me.

I lock the door on my way out. I stand in the hallway for a second with my hand still on the knob, feeling the particular stupidity of the gesture — locking a door against a man who has already proven the lock means nothing to him, who can get past a latch and a deadbolt and a chain the same unhurried way he gets past a voicemail greeting — and I do it anyway, because some rituals you keep even after you've learned they're only theater.

Outside, the wind off the river cuts sideways down Doyle Avenue, and the cold gets into the seam of my coat where a button's missing, and I stand there on the sidewalk with a roll of wet paintings under one arm and my father's brushes under the other, and I let myself actually look at what I'm holding versus what I'm leaving behind.

I'm leaving behind an apartment I've paid for, on and off, for almost four years — the lease with my name on it, the mattress on the floor, the tub I've bathed in since before I knew what Dominic Russo's hands felt like on the back of my neck — and it turns out that apartment is the one place in my life where someone can let themselves in, straighten my cabinet, close my laptop, breathe eucalyptus into my kitchen air, and leave without a single locked door registering the visit.

And the house I'm walking back toward — the house with a floor safe under a rug, a folder of autopsy photographs squared at the corners on a desk, a gun wrapped in grey cloth, a man inside it who has spent twenty-seven years planning to end his own father in front of witnesses and has told me flatly he does not expect to survive it — that house has a man stationed at the end of the block whose whole job is knowing who comes and goes. That house has locks that get checked. That house is the one place in my entire life right now where nobody gets in that Dominic doesn't already know about.

It should be the opposite. I understand, standing here with my ears going numb, that it should be the opposite — that a house built on a killing shouldn't feel like the safe one, that a man planning a murder shouldn't be the version of shelter I reach for instinctively, the way you reach for a wall when the ground moves. But the ground has been moving under Doyle Avenue apparently for four months without my knowing it, quietly, patiently, someone else's hands in my drawers while I thought I was untouchable in the one room that was supposed to be only mine.

I start walking. Not toward the bus stop, not toward my car parked two blocks up with its oil light still on — toward Federal Hill, on foot, in eighteen degrees, because I want the cold the whole way there, want to feel every block of the decision I'm making instead of arriving at it already made.

I'm not calling Simone. I'm not calling my mother. I'm walking toward a house with a body count in its recent history because it is, right now, today, the only room left to me where I can breathe without wondering whose hand touched the air before mine did.

That should scare me more than it does.

I keep walking anyway.