The sedan is parked wrong.

That's the first thing I clock, before I even register what it is — it's parked wrong for Doyle Avenue at seven-forty in the morning, nose out instead of nose in, which nobody does on this block because the plow banks the snow up against the far curb and you'll rip your oil pan trying to angle out. Black, mid-size, government-plain in the way that isn't plain at all once you've learned to see it, windows a half-shade too dark for Rhode Island's inspection rules. I've walked past this exact car twice already this week without letting myself count it as the same car. Today I count it.

Four.

Doyle Ave on Thursday, seven-ten a.m., driver's-side window down two inches for a cigarette nobody smoked. Doyle Ave again on Saturday, parked outside Mancini's instead of my building, like that made it a coincidence. Monday, across from the Bellini, idling long enough that Gennaro came out and stood in his own doorway with his arms crossed until it pulled away. And now this, parked below the Federal Hill house at an hour when nobody on that street idles, because that street doesn't get visitors who don't already know where to park.

I stand on the sidewalk with my bag cutting into my shoulder and do the math the way I've done all my math since September — forward and back, four sightings in six days, and I already know, the way you know a headache is going to be a migraine before the light starts doing the thing to your eyes, that counting it doesn't make it stop.

My car's parked at the curb, the Corolla, oil light on since July, and there's something tucked under the driver's-side wiper. A card. Folded once.

I stand there a second too long before I go get it. Long enough that if the sedan is watching — and it is, it has to be, that's the whole design of it — whoever's inside gets to see me hesitate.

I pull it free. It's cardstock, cheap, folded in a crisp line down the middle like it went through a machine before it went through a hand. I open it standing in the street with the cold coming up through the soles of my boots.

FERRARO, MAYA.

Typed. Not handwritten. The accent I never use over the second A — the one my grandmother insisted on and my mother dropped and I never picked back up, the one that isn't on my driver's license, isn't on my lease, isn't on a single piece of paper I've ever filled out myself — is there anyway. Somebody had to go looking for that. Somebody had to pull a document I don't remember signing.

Below it, one line.

Call before it gets filed. A phone number. Boston area code.

No name. No badge. No signature. It doesn't need one, because I know the font — that slightly-too-heavy serif with the crooked lowercase e, the printer in the second bedroom he used as an office that jammed on legal-size paper for two straight years and that he complained about, genuinely complained about, like it was a moral failing of the machine and not something he could've replaced for eighty dollars.

The ground does the thing.

I've felt this exact tilt before — once, in an apartment I don't live in anymore, the night I figured out he'd been reading my texts over my shoulder without needing to be in the room, some app synced quietly to his laptop, and the floor of the kitchen had genuinely seemed to lean, like a boat under a wake, and I'd had to put both hands flat on the counter to prove to my own body that the counter wasn't moving. It happens again now, standing in the street. My hand goes out on its own, flat, palm down, against the roof of the Corolla, cold enough to sting, and I hold it there until the street stops doing whatever it thinks it's doing.

Correctly spelled. That's the part that won't let go of me, walking to the studio an hour later, card folded back into my coat pocket where it sits like a stone I swallowed on purpose. Not the sedan. Not the phone number. The accent. Someone went and found the one version of my name that isn't in casual use anywhere, and put it on a piece of paper, and left it where I'd find it alone.

—

Simone's got ink up to the elbow of one arm and a sock that says TUESDAY on a day that is, in fact, Tuesday, and a different sock underneath it that says nothing at all, just plain grey with a hole starting at the toe. She's re-registering a print run of tote bags — not the sunflowers, something new, navy on cream — and doesn't look up until I put the card down flat on her worktable next to the squeegee.

She reads it once. Then again, longer, the way you read something you're hoping will say something different the second time.

"That's the ex," she says. Not a question.

"That's the ex."

"The FBI one."

"The FBI one."

She sets the squeegee down like it's suddenly too heavy to be holding while thinking about something else, wipes her hand on her coveralls, leaving a streak of navy that'll be there for a week.

"He never let you go," she says. "You know that, right? He just changed departments."

I laugh, because the alternative is the other thing, and the laugh comes out wrong, thin, more air than sound.

"That's — Simone, that's actually very good. Can I get that on a shirt?"

"I'm serious." She isn't smiling. Her eyes go to the card again, to the accent over the A, and something in her face changes, goes careful in a way I don't love. "Maya. He found the version of your name that basically nobody uses. That's not a guy checking up on an ex-girlfriend. That's a file. That's — that's a person who's had you in a system this whole time."

"I know."

"Do you?" She says it gently, which is somehow worse than if she'd said it hard. "Because you've got the same face you had in 2019 telling the ER nurse you reached for a shelf."

I don't have an answer for that, so I don't give her one. She lets the silence sit for exactly as long as it takes her to decide I'm not going to fill it, and then she does what Simone does, which is solve the practical problem in front of her because the emotional one is too big to fit on the table.

"Stay at mine tonight. I've got the cot, it's not great, but it's warm and there's a lock that isn't a hundred years old."

"I can't."

"Cousin's friend Adaeze does this exact thing for a living, domestic stuff, federal stuff, she'd take your call tonight if I asked her."

"I can't afford a lawyer, Simone."

"I've got four hundred dollars sitting in an account doing nothing. Take it. I'm not going to miss it."

And this is the part where I hate myself a little, standing in a studio that smells like heat-cured ink and old coffee, because the honest answer to all three offers is the same answer, and it isn't dignity and it isn't independence, it's arithmetic. I have forty-something dollars to my name that I earned myself since December. Everything else — the rent that's paid through June, the four hundred still folded in my coat from this morning, the coat itself — came from a man whose money I've stopped being able to separate from his hands, his house, his name. If I take Simone's four hundred dollars I am, for one day, a person standing on her own ground. And I can't make myself do it, because some old wiring in me has already filed Simone's kindness under debt I can't repay the same way it used to file Trevor's, and I would rather owe the man who scares me in a way I've chosen than the friend who scares me in a way I haven't earned yet.

"I'm okay," I say, which is the specific lie I've gotten so good at that it barely costs me anything to say out loud anymore.

She doesn't believe it. She doesn't fight it either. She just folds the card back into my palm, closes my fingers over it with both of hers, and says, "Ninth of the month. You call me or I show up at that house."

"I know."

"I mean it, Maya."

"I know."

—

The house is warm when I get back, which still catches me sometimes, walking in from outside where everything is the color of a bruise into a kitchen where the radiators actually work and somebody has already put a pot of something on the stove. Dominic's at the table with his coat still on, which means he just got in, which means Bruno's Lincoln is probably still ticking in the driveway.

I could not tell him. That's the truest thing I know standing in the doorway with my coat half off one shoulder — I could put the card in the drawer with the burner phone charger and the takeout menus and never say a word, and some nights that's exactly what I plan to do, right up until the moment it isn't.

"My ex is FBI," I say instead, flat, the way you'd report a broken appliance. "Boston field office. He left a card on my windshield today."

I keep it small on purpose. An ex. A job. A card. I don't say Deb Okonjo and I don't say April twelfth, two thousand twenty-one and I don't say forty-six months, because I don't have those numbers yet, not really, not in a way I could hand him — I have a torn corner of paper under a sugar bowl and a woman with wet shoulders telling me to get things in writing, and none of it has resolved into a shape I could put into words without sounding like I'm accusing the air of something. I tell myself that's why I keep it small. I don't examine the other reason too closely — that some part of me is still, after everything, protecting the version of this where it isn't as bad as it is.

Dominic goes very still.

Not dramatic-still. Not a flinch, not a jaw thing, nothing you'd catch on a camera across a room. It's the stillness of a man recalculating something mid-motion, the way water goes flat right before it decides which way to fall.

"Show me," he says.

I take the card out of my coat pocket. He doesn't reach for it right away. When he does, he takes it by the edges — just the edges, like he's already thinking about who might want to lift something off it later — and reads it. Once, fast. Then again, slow, the second pass going word by word, his mouth working the shape of the letters without sound.

"How's he spell his surname," he says, not looking up.

"L-A-N-G." My mouth is dry. I swallow it audibly, then talk faster to cover the sound, which is exactly what I always do and exactly what he's clocked by now, I'm sure, filed next to whatever else he keeps on me. "Trevor Lang. Like — like the word."

He sets the card down on the table, face up, squared to the edge the way he squares everything, and puts his right hand flat over it. The burn scar catches the kitchen light, that shiny four-inch stretch climbing off his knuckles toward the wrist, and he leaves his hand there — not covering the card so much as anchoring it, like it might otherwise lift off the table and go looking for something on its own — and he doesn't say anything for what feels like a long time.

The kitchen is quiet enough that I can hear the radiator tick.

He reaches over, without looking at me, and takes my hand off the table — my left hand, which I realize only once he's holding it is cold enough that I can feel the difference immediately, the way you don't notice a room's temperature until somebody hands you something warmer than it — and folds both of his around it. He doesn't look at me while he does it. His eyes stay on the card. His thumb moves once, slow, over my knuckles, and the burn-scarred half of his palm where there's supposed to be no feeling presses against the back of my hand anyway, warm through numbness he's told me doesn't exist there anymore, and I sit with my hand inside both of his and my heart doing something stupid and disproportionate to the size of the gesture, because it is not a big gesture, it is a man warming a cold hand while he thinks about a threat, and I know that, and it still lands in my chest like something with weight.

"Okay," he says, finally, to the card and not to me.

He picks up the kitchen phone — the landline, the one with the cord, not the burner — and dials from memory, and when it picks up he doesn't say hello. He says something short, low, in a dialect I only catch the shape of, not the words — Bruno's name in there, and macchina, and a string of numbers that I understand are a plate even though I don't understand the language they're wrapped in, and then a color, and then he's off the phone in under a minute, standing at the counter with his back to me, both hands flat on the edge of it.

And that's when it lands — really lands, past the warmth of his hands still ghosting on mine — that I just handed a description of a federal agent's car to the underboss of a family that puts men in the ground behind a cafe on neutral ground, and that the machinery I just fed a plate number into does not, as far as I have ever seen it operate, run in reverse.

—

The groceries come to Doyle Avenue two days later. I'm not even there — I find out from Pariseau, who mentions it in passing, half-apologetic, that a delivery van left two bags on the second-floor landing because nobody answered, and when I go by that evening to collect them there's a receipt stapled to the bag that I did not order, paid for by a card that isn't mine, billed to an address that isn't this one — my old one, the one from before Doyle Avenue, the one I haven't lived at in four years and that Trevor is the only person alive who would think to type into a billing field out of habit rather than looking it up.

Inside the bag: bread, coffee, a six-pack of yoghurt. Not just any yoghurt. The brand, the flavor, the specific small glass jars he used to buy because the plastic kind, he said, tasted like plastic, and I never once told him that was a real difference I could taste too, I just started liking the glass jars because he did, the way you absorb somebody's preferences without noticing until years later they're still sitting in your fridge like a ghost with a grocery list.

I stand in the cold stairwell holding a jar of yoghurt I didn't buy, and I don't cry, and I don't throw it, I just put it back in the bag and carry the whole thing down to the dumpster behind the building and drop it in without opening a single other item.

—

That night, in the dark of the Federal Hill house, with Dominic's breathing gone slow and even beside me, I lie awake and do the arithmetic I've been avoiding since the sugar bowl.

September the eighth. The tracker, blue tape, folded the way he folds everything, in the wheel well of a car I've owned since before I signed this lease. April the twelfth, two thousand twenty-one — three months after I left him, a date on a torn case caption with everything else blacked out. Forty-six months. I don't know where that number comes from except that it sits in my chest anyway, unbidden, the way a word you can't place still shows up whole in a dream. Forty-six months of something. Of a file. Of a car parked wrong outside my building at seven in the morning. Of a woman in a wet blazer telling me to get things in writing before I believe them.

I don't wake Dominic to tell him any of it. I lie there with my hand where he left it warm hours ago and let the numbers run without saying a single one of them out loud, and some cold, clear part of me — the part that used to count words, used to count exits, used to lose the count at three every single time — knows exactly what I'm doing. I am protecting him from a shape I haven't finished drawing yet. I know it's the wrong instinct even as I choose it. I choose it anyway.

—

Seven days go by the way water goes down a drain you've already checked twice for a clog — slow, then all at once, then gone before you can say when it started moving.

Deb Okonjo's card sits unused in the lining of my coat where it slid through a hole in the pocket I never fixed. The sedan doesn't come back — not on Doyle Avenue, not outside the Bellini, not below the house — and Dominic's men, whoever they are, whatever they found on that plate, come back with nothing that means anything to me, no name I'm told, no address, just Dominic's face going a little less still each day that passes without another card, another delivery, another idling car.

February comes in cold and ordinary. Bruno makes soup twice. I finish the hot sauce label and mail the file to Olneyville and get paid, actual money, four hundred dollars that's entirely mine, and for six days running I let myself believe — not fully, never fully, but enough to sleep — that whatever this was, it's done its worst and moved on to someone else's windshield.

Tuesday morning, the fourth of February, I come downstairs at seven-forty to the sound of the front door already open and cold air moving through the hall, and there are two men standing in the vestibule in dark overcoats, government-plain the way that sedan was government-plain, and one of them is holding a folded paper out toward the kitchen doorway where I'm standing in socked feet with my hair still wet.

He says my name. Both of them, first and last, no accent this time, no need for one.

Bruno is already halfway down the stairs behind me, moving fast for a man his size, and Dominic's chair scrapes back from the table hard enough to catch on the floorboards, and none of it — not one second of it — feels like the seven quiet days that came before.