The cash is still in my coat pocket when I let myself into the Doyle Avenue building, four hundred dollars in a rubber band that Dominic left on the kitchen counter this morning without a word, folded the way he folds everything, corners squared. I haven't been here in eleven days. The stairwell smells the way it always does in January — wet salt and old radiator dust — and my key sticks in the lock the way it always has, needing the half-turn-back trick Mr. Pariseau has never fixed in four years.

Four years next month. I do the math without meaning to, the way I do all my math these days, counting forward and back from dates that used to be neutral and aren't anymore.

Inside, it's thirty-nine degrees. I know this because there's a thermometer stuck to the window with a suction cup that used to be a joke gift from Simone — so you can prove it to Pariseau — and it reads thirty-nine the way it's read somewhere in the high thirties every time I've come back since December. The radiators bang twice, sulk, bang again. Half my plants are dead. Not the important ones — Bruno took those weeks ago, the jade cutting from my father, the pothos that used to sit on the bathtub ledge — but the rest sit in their pots along the windowsill and the kitchen counter with their leaves gone the grey-brown of wet newspaper, curling in on themselves like something that gave up trying to be green.

I go through the motions anyway. I always go through the motions. I water the two or three that still have some fight in them, and I take the rent envelope out of my bag — the one I filled last night with two hundred and fifty dollars of Dominic's cash even though I already know, because Pariseau told me himself back in early January, that this apartment is paid through June — and I put it in the mail slot of his door on the ground floor anyway, because a paper trail that only exists on one end isn't a paper trail. It's a hole. I am trying, this whole visit, to not be a hole. To be a woman who still lives somewhere, who still pays rent somewhere, who still has a whole separate life that nobody would ever think to look at twice.

I'm sitting on the edge of the mattress, coat still on, blowing into my cupped hands, when the knock comes.

Three raps. Even spacing. Not Pariseau's knock, which is a single knuckle, apologetic, like he's sorry to be reminding anyone of anything. Not Bruno's, which doesn't happen because Bruno calls first. Not Simone's, who bangs with the flat of her hand like the door owes her money.

I go still on the mattress the way I've learned to go still, cataloguing before I move. Uno, la porta della strada — the street door, which locks, which I heard latch behind me on the way in. Due — I lose the count already, the way I always do, somewhere around the fire escape, which is painted shut in December and hasn't opened since.

I cross to the door and look through the peephole, and there's a woman standing in the hallway with snow starting to melt on the shoulders of a navy blazer, no coat over it, like she walked here fast enough that she didn't think a coat was worth the time.

"Ms. Ferraro." Her voice comes through the door, even and unhurried, pitched for a hallway with thin walls. "I know it's cold. Can I come in for a minute before we do the part where I show you paperwork on a landing?"

That's the first thing I notice — that she leads with the cold, not the badge. It's a choice. I've spent four years learning to read a person's opening move the way you'd read the first three seconds of somebody walking into a room drunk, and this is a woman who has decided that warmth is the door she wants to walk through first, which means she has already thought about which door works on me before she knocked.

I open it anyway. I don't know why except that not opening it feels like the more dangerous thing to do, the thing that gets noted somewhere.

She's tall — taller than me by a head, rangy in the way of someone who runs for exercise rather than because anyone's chasing her — with close-cropped hair shaved at the sides, flat-soled boots dark to the ankle with slush. The blazer has gone a deeper navy at both shoulders where the snow's soaked through and is starting to bleed down toward the lapels. She doesn't shiver. She stands in my doorway like the cold is a fact about the weather and not a fact about her.

"Deb Okonjo," she says, and now the badge comes out, wallet flipped open and closed again almost too fast to read, gold shield, blue lettering I don't fully catch except for the word Federal. "Got a minute?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Always." She says it like she means it, which is its own kind of pressure. "But it's nine degrees warmer in there than out here, so."

I let her in.

She stands just inside the door and looks at the room the way I imagine she looks at everything — once, fast, cataloguing, the way I do, except she's better at hiding that she's doing it. Her eyes go to the mattress on the floor. The dead plants. The bathtub against the kitchen wall, which always gets a half-second longer than anything else from anyone who's never seen one before. She doesn't ask about it. I respect that, a little, even now.

"You want coffee?" I ask, because my mother raised me to offer coffee to anyone standing in a cold room, federal agent or not.

"No, thank you."

I put the kettle on anyway. It's an old habit, filling silence with a task, and by the time it's screamed itself hot she's changed her mind, or performed changing it. "Actually — yeah. If it's no trouble."

I make her a cup. She takes it in both hands, holds it at her collarbone the way you'd hold something for the warmth of it, and never once brings it to her mouth. I notice this the way I notice everything lately, filing it next to the badge flash and the blazer she doesn't take off even inside, even with the radiator banging its useless heat into the room.

"You've had this place a while," she says. Not a question yet.

"Four years next month."

"Same car this whole time?"

"Same Corolla. Same oil light that's been on since July."

"Anybody ever work on it for you? Service it, that kind of thing?"

I hold her eyes for exactly as long as it takes to decide the honest answer costs me nothing. "The mechanic on Manton does the oil when I can afford it. Nobody else touches it."

I don't say found a tracker in the wheel well back in September, wrapped in blue tape, threw it down a storm drain. I don't say my ex-boyfriend, who happens to also carry a badge like yours, put it there sometime around when I signed this lease. I say nothing about it at all, and I watch her face for the half-second flicker that would tell me she already knows and is testing whether I'll volunteer it, and either she's too good for the flicker to show or there isn't one to show.

"You mind if I ask how you make rent on this place?"

"Freelance design. Badly, lately." I let that sit. "Is this an audit?"

"No." She almost smiles. "I'm not that interesting."

"You knock on a lot of doors in the snow for something that isn't interesting."

That gets the closest thing to a real reaction I've seen from her — a small pull at the corner of her mouth, gone fast, like she's filing me the same way I'm filing her.

"Ms. Ferraro. Have you ever been approached by federal law enforcement before today?"

I think about Trevor on my steps in September with two coffees and a business card, cream government weight, an eagle stamped into it. I think about the word approached and decide, the way you decide which lie is technically true, that a man I dated for seven years showing up as an ex is not the same category of thing as a badge at my door on official business.

"No," I say.

She doesn't write it down. She doesn't have a notebook out at all, no pen, nothing, and that absence does something to my stomach that a notebook wouldn't have — an elevator drop, cable cut, the kind I usually fix by eating something. There's nothing to eat here. I swallow instead, dry, audible, and talk fast to cover the sound of it.

"Should I be writing anything down? Is there — do I need to call someone? A lawyer?"

Her pause, before she answers, runs maybe half a second longer than it should. I count it the way I count everything else now. Uno. Due.

"That's your right, whenever you want to exercise it," she says, which is not an answer, which is a sentence built by someone who has said it in a deposition before. "I'm not here to arrest anybody today, if that's what you're asking."

"Today."

"I'm not here to arrest anybody," she says again, flatter, closing the door on the word she let slip the first time.

"You still haven't told me what this is about."

"I know."

"Is that a policy or a choice?"

"Both," she says, and this time the almost-smile stays a beat longer, like she's enjoying the exchange despite herself, the way you'd enjoy a chess opponent who's better than you expected. "Can I ask you something else?"

"You're going to whether I say yes."

"Do you have a personal relationship right now with anyone who might be of investigative interest to federal law enforcement?"

There it is. The sentence I've been waiting for since she said my last name through the door — a sentence built by lawyers, in a room I'll never see, workshopped word by word until it could be answered honestly by me and still mean everything it needs to mean to her. Might be. Of interest. Nothing that names a name. Nothing that would let me call anyone and say they said this exact thing.

My forearm scar goes cold under my sleeve before the rest of me catches up to being afraid, the old two-inch line from a January five years back going tight and strange the way it does sometimes, an early warning system I've never once been able to talk myself out of trusting.

"I don't know how to answer a question with that many maybes in it," I say.

"That's a fair answer."

"Is it official? This visit. Is there a case number, a file, something I could ask my — someone about?"

Her pause this time is worse. Long enough that I watch her decide something behind her eyes, weighing a scale I can't see the other side of.

"There's paper," she says finally. "I'm not going to tell you what it says."

"Convenient."

"It's not for me to say. That's not the same as convenient."

I look at the mattress, at the dust outline on the windowsill where a lamp used to sit before I moved most of my life two blocks and a world away, and I say the lie without deciding to say it, the way lies come out sometimes when you've had four years of practice keeping a room believing something that isn't true anymore.

"I still live here," I say, and gesture at the mattress like it's proof of something. "This is my place."

Her eyes go, just for a second, to that same dust ring on the sill — pale wood where a lamp base sat for years, sun-faded around it, the lamp itself long gone to Federal Hill with the jade cutting and the pothos — and something passes behind her face that isn't quite disbelief. It's closer to noted. She doesn't correct me. She doesn't need to. We both let the lie stand there between us like a third person in the room, and something about her letting it stand frightens me more than if she'd argued.

She sets the untouched coffee down on the counter, near the sugar bowl, and picks her way toward the door through the cold like she's already finished whatever she came here to finish.

At the threshold she stops. Snow melt has left a dark, spreading patch on the boards where she stood, and it's still running off the shoulders of the blazer in thin lines, dripping onto the sill of my own front door in a way that makes me think of something thawing that was never supposed to thaw indoors.

"Ms. Ferraro." Her voice has changed register, just slightly, into something that sounds — almost — like it isn't performing anymore. "If anyone ever tells you they've been keeping track of you. For your own protection. Anybody at all." She looks at me directly for the first time since she walked in, and there's something in it that isn't procedure. "Get that in writing. Whatever they say, however they say it. Get it in writing before you believe a word of it."

I don't have an answer for that. My mouth opens and nothing comes.

She reaches into the blazer's inside pocket — the fabric there darker than the rest, wet through — and holds out a business card, face-down, the cardstock gone soft at one corner from the damp. I take it without turning it over.

"Stay warm," she says, which is a strange thing to say to a woman standing in a thirty-nine-degree apartment, and then she's gone, boots quiet on the stairs, and I stand at the door listening for the street door below to open and shut, that particular clunk-and-settle sound the old hinge makes, before I let myself move at all.

It closes. I count to ten in my head — actual numbers this time, not exits, not Italian, just counting because I need something plain to hold onto — and then I turn the card over.

DEBORAH OKONJO. Federal Bureau of Investigation. A phone number with a Boston exchange, the same three digits Trevor's has carried since September, since the first time his name lit up my screen from a number I'd deleted four years ago.

I set it on the counter next to the coffee mug she never drank from, and that's when I see it — a corner of paper sticking out from under the sugar bowl, exactly where her hip was leaning while she talked to me, tucked there so precisely it can't have been an accident, can't have been anything but deliberate, the kind of thing you do when you want someone to find a thing without you having to be the one who handed it to them.

I pull it free.

It's a photocopy, just the corner of a page, the rest torn or cut away clean, most of the text blacked out in thick redaction bars except for a header running along the top — a case caption, government-formatted, the kind of thing I've never in my life had reason to read closely before this exact moment — and beneath the black bars, a single line that hasn't been touched.

A date.

April 12, 2021.

I read it twice, because the first time my eyes skip past it the way eyes skip past things too large to hold, and the second time it sits in my chest like something swallowed wrong. April, 2021. Three months — I do the math without wanting to, the same automatic arithmetic I've been running on for weeks now — three months after I put a duffel bag in my car and drove away from an apartment on the other side of this city with nothing but what I could carry.

Three months after I left Trevor Lang.

I stand in my own cold kitchen with a stranger's business card in one hand and a torn corner of federal paper in the other, and the name that comes up in my throat, dry, unspoken, isn't the date at all.

It's his.