Mr. Pariseau counts the keys twice before he believes there are only two of them — the deadbolt and the mailbox — like I might be palming a third somewhere, a spare he doesn't know about, proof I'm not really leaving. I hand him the notice folded in thirds, the way you fold something you don't want to look at while you're carrying it, and he unfolds it standing at the bottom of the stairwell with his readers pushed up on his forehead and reads it twice, moving his lips.

"Four years," he says. Not a question. A number he's doing something with in his head, rent times months, some private accounting of his own.

"Four years and ten days," I say, and I don't know why I correct him, except that it feels important suddenly that the number be exact, that at least one thing today land on the decimal point instead of somewhere approximate and forgivable.

He asks for a signature at the bottom, surrender of tenancy, and hands me a pen that's run half dry, and I press it to the line and my hand comes down wrong — not shaking exactly, more like a current running under the skin that the pen picks up and translates into a signature that doesn't match the one on my license, doesn't match anything I've ever signed, loops where there should be lines.

"Do it again," he says, not unkindly. "Bank'll kick it back otherwise."

I haven't eaten since Tuesday. Not really eaten — I've had coffee, I've had the half a granola bar Bruno left in his coat pocket and forgot about, I've had four black coffees today alone standing at the counter of a place on Atwells that doesn't know my name, and my body has apparently decided this is a crisis worth reporting through my hands, my hands are the messenger, and I sign it again, slower, gripping the pen the way you'd grip a railing on a boat, and this time it looks like me. Barely.

Pariseau takes the paper back, folds it along its own creases, tells me the deposit check will come to whatever forwarding address I give him.

I don't have one yet. I give him Federal Hill.

He doesn't ask why a woman who's rented the same forty-dollar-a-month-under-market one-bedroom for four years is suddenly forwarding her mail to Atwells Avenue, and I understand, watching his face carefully arrange itself into nothing at all, that he already knows exactly whose house that is, and has decided this is one of the many things in his professional life he will not be curious about out loud.

Simone is already double-parked when I come out, hazards going, back doors of the rental van thrown open onto the street. She doesn't say good morning. She starts hauling pots.

"Eleven," she says, not to me exactly, more to the inventory in her head, "already at the house, those you're keeping, don't touch them, I'm not talking about those." She grunts a schefflera onto the hand truck. "These eight, I'm taking. Don't ask me what I'm going to do with eight half-dead plants in my studio that already smells like a chemical fire. I'll figure it out. I always figure it out."

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." She straps the load down hard enough that the ratchet clicks twice. "That's not the same as me leaving them here to die in a locked apartment because you can't look at them anymore."

We work in silence for a while, up and down the two flights, my arms shaking by the third trip in a way that has nothing to do with the weight of the pots, and I keep waiting for the argument to start because I can feel it building in her the whole time, in the set of her jaw, in the way she doesn't look at me when she talks.

It comes on the fifth trip, on the sidewalk, both of us catching our breath against the open van doors.

"You have no job," she says. Flat. Not cruel, just accounting, same as Pariseau with his rent math. "No savings. No lease. As of an hour ago, no address that's yours. Every single road out of this, Maya, every single one, runs straight through a man who tells you what to do with your body and your face for a living, and I watched you do this exact math with Trevor and I am doing it again right now, out loud, on a public street, because somebody has to."

"He's burning forty million dollars," I say, and it comes out thinner than I want it to, my voice with no floor under it. "For me. He's taking apart everything he's built since he was seventeen years old so that I don't end up—"

"That's not an answer." Simone doesn't raise her voice. She's worse than shouting; she's precise. "That's a receipt. You're telling me the size of the gift. I'm asking what happens to you the day it stops being enough."

I don't have anything for that. I stand there on Doyle Avenue with a jade cutting in my arms that used to sit on my father's windowsill before it sat on mine, and I let her be right, because she is, and because I'm too hungry and too tired to build the wall I usually build when she gets like this.

She hugs me at the van, quick and hard, smelling like ink and cold air and the same drugstore shampoo she's used since design school, and says, "Call me Thursday. The ninth-of-the-month thing still stands, don't think dying to a federal indictment gets you out of it," and pulls away from the curb before I can decide whether that was a joke.

There's a phone box on Wickenden that still works, one of the last three left in Providence probably, and I use it instead of my cell because some animal part of my brain has decided that a number filed under Maya Ferraro's name is a liability now, even for something this stupid, even for calling a lawyer.

The first one has a receptionist with a voice like a dial tone who quotes me twenty-five thousand dollars as a retainer before she'll even put me on the calendar for a consult.

The second one gets on the phone himself, older-sounding, patient, asks me two sentences about the nature of the exposure, and when I say federal, organized crime adjacent, possible material witness, he doesn't even blink before he says forty, and that forty means forty thousand, and that it's non-refundable regardless of outcome.

The third one asks for the case caption. I don't have one — Trevor never let me hold the paper, only read it — so I describe it instead, HILLSIDE, April 2021, and there's a long enough pause on the line that I think we've been disconnected, and then he says, very evenly, that he's going to have to decline, that he has existing relationships in that district he can't jeopardize, and wishes me luck, and hangs up before I can ask what relationships means.

I stand in the phone box with the receiver still in my hand, the dial tone going, and I do the math I've been avoiding since I signed the surrender at Pariseau's stairwell. Three hundred and twelve dollars. That's what's in the checking account that has my actual name on it. Three hundred and twelve dollars against a retainer that starts at twenty-five thousand for the privilege of someone else telling me what my rights are.

I hang up the phone gently, like it might break, and walk back to Federal Hill because I don't trust my legs to drive.

—

Tuesday, and I am not supposed to be in the room. Nobody says this out loud — nobody has to — but I know it the way you know a temperature has dropped before you see your own breath: from the quality of the silence when I come down in the morning and find Nunzio already at the kitchen table, tinted glasses on indoors, gloves folded beside his coffee cup he hasn't touched, and Rocco arriving twenty minutes later in the camel overcoat with Teresa a step behind him carrying a legal pad instead of her usual folders.

Dominic tells me to sit.

Not asks. Tells, with his hand flat against the small of my back for half a second, guiding me to the chair at the end of the table like this is a courtesy, like there's any universe in which putting me in this specific chair, in this specific room, is a courtesy and not a statement he's making to two men who have known him since before he could shave.

Nobody addresses me directly for the first twenty minutes. They talk around me instead, over me, through me, in the dialect I only half-catch, words I recognize the shape of without their meaning — problema, sistemare, i federali — and I sit with my hands flat on my thighs under the table where nobody can see them not being steady, and I count the exits without meaning to, my father's old habit rising up out of the hunger and the fear like it always does. Uno, la porta della cucina. Due, la finestra sopra il lavello. Tre—

I lose it at three. I always lose it at three.

Rocco is the one who finally says my name, and when he does, the whole table goes quiet in that specific wrong-order way, the silence arriving before the sentence instead of after it.

"The federals," he says, not to Dominic, to me, his cane-hand resting on the table like a gavel he hasn't used yet. "They've spoken to you."

It isn't a question the way Pariseau's four years wasn't a question. It's an answer already assumed, waiting for me to confirm the shape of it.

I keep my face still. I have gotten good at this, these past months, better than I ever wanted to be, and I hold Rocco's eyes and say nothing, because I understand, in the half-second before Dominic answers for me, that whatever comes out of his mouth next is going to be the first lie I've ever heard him tell in front of me, and that I am going to have to sit here and let it be true.

"No," Dominic says.

Flat. Even. The same voice he used counting to four on his own kitchen floor two nights ago, and it lands in the room exactly the way he wants it to, which is to say it lands like fact, like something that could be checked against a ledger and found accurate.

Nobody in the room knows about the windowless room with the one dead fluorescent tube. Nobody in the room knows about the binders, the timestamped hours, the blank indictment with my name typed under it, no accent. Nobody but the two of us and, God help me, a man named Trevor Lang, know that Rocco's question has already been answered, six days ago, in a federal building downtown, by me, out loud, on the record — that the federals didn't just speak to me, they showed me my own life laid out like a crime scene and asked me to sign it.

Dominic looks at Rocco and lies with his whole face, easily, the way you'd say the sky is blue, and I sit three feet away with my hands flat on my thighs and understand, with a clarity that makes my stomach drop out like an elevator with the cable cut, that I am now the reason this man lies to his own consigliere. That I have made him into someone who does that. That whatever else this costs, it has already cost him that.

Rocco studies him for a long moment, the wet cough folded somewhere behind his silence, and then nods once, slow, and moves the conversation on to something about Fall River routes as if the question had never mattered, and I know — the way you know a held breath is finally let out somewhere across a room — that he doesn't believe it. Not for a second. He's just decided, for reasons of his own, to let the lie stand on the record.

—

The room clears a little after four. Nunzio leaves first, gloves still folded on the table, forgotten. Rocco and Teresa go together, murmuring about a signature that needs a notary by Friday.

Dominic finds me at the sink, where I've gone because standing at a sink with running water is the closest thing I have left to a private act, and he turns my face toward him with two fingers under my chin, gentle, the way you'd handle something you already knew was cracked.

"Open," he says.

I open. He looks at the back left molar, the one I split biting down on a plastic fork a few days ago, at the thin dark seam where blood has been seeping into the gum line every time I forget and chew on that side, and his face does the thing it does — flattens, goes administrative, files the problem instead of reacting to it.

"Thursday," he says. "Ten a.m. Under a different name. I'll write it down for you."

He doesn't ask if it hurts. He doesn't say I'm sorry you're bleeding in your own mouth and didn't tell me. He books an appointment, under a false name, for a tooth I cracked out of fear in his kitchen, and that is the whole conversation, and I hate — I actually hate, in a small clean way — that this is the thing that makes my throat go tight instead of the lying to Rocco, instead of any of it.

—

I find him again near ten that night in the study, door half open, the desk lamp the only light, and he's on the phone in an English that has gone strange around the edges, vowels bent slightly wrong, and it takes me a second standing in the doorway to place it — French, or French pretending to be careful English, a broker's voice on the other end asking questions Dominic answers in numbers.

"Two sets," he says. "Clean. Days, not weeks." A pause. "Cash, all of it, on delivery." Another pause, and something that might almost be a dry laugh. "I don't need a discount. I need it quiet."

He sees me in the doorway and doesn't stop, doesn't lower his voice, doesn't do any of the things a man does when he wants a lie to survive contact with a witness. He just finishes the call — a date, a location I don't catch, a number that isn't a phone number — and sets the phone face-down on the desk.

"What names," I say, because there's no version of pretending I didn't hear it.

"Haven't chosen." He says it the way he said Thursday, ten a.m. Administrative. Already filed under things that will get done.

"I want to choose mine."

He looks at me across the desk lamp's small circle of light for a long moment, and something in his face — not softening, exactly, more like a held breath finally let out somewhere behind his eyes — settles.

"Okay," he says.

That's all. Okay. And it terrifies me how much that one flat syllable does for the hollow place under my ribs, how much comfort I manage to pull out of a man agreeing that I get to name myself when he's the one erasing the name I already have.

—

Nunzio comes back for his gloves a little after eleven, snow starting outside the front window in slow, deliberate flakes, and he finds me alone in the hall with my coat half on, waiting on nothing in particular, waiting the way you wait when you've stopped being able to tell exhaustion from dread.

He doesn't say hello. He picks his gloves up off the side table where he left them and holds them without putting them on, looking at me with an expression I can't fully name — not unkind, not kind either, something older than either of those words.

"Whatever he told you about his mother," he says, quiet, "ask him who was in the house."

My skin goes cold before my mind catches up to why. "I know who was in the house," I say. "I know about your cuffs. I know what you said to Gennaro."

"That's not what I mean." He pulls one glove on, slow, methodical, buying himself time or giving me some. "Ask him whose story you've been told. There's the one he tells himself, and there's the one that's true, and they haven't been the same story since he was twelve years old."

"I read the file," I say, before I can stop myself, my voice coming out steadier than I feel. "December twenty-eighth. The safe. The autopsy photographs, the police report, all of it. I know what happened to her."

Nunzio goes very still.

Something moves behind his tinted glasses that I can't read — not surprise exactly, something closer to recalculation, a man doing sums he thought he'd already finished.

"Then you know more than his father thinks you do," he says, very quietly, pulling the second glove on. "God help you both."

He's out the door and into the snow before I can ask him a single one of the eleven questions already crowding my throat, before I can ask what Florida knowing has to do with anything, before I can ask what exactly his father thinks I don't know — and by the time I get the door open to call after him, there's nothing on the porch but his footprints filling in fast, white going over black, and the cold coming in around my bare feet like it's got somewhere to be.