I apply my undereye concealer with shaking hands, not wanting to deal with questions at the hair braiding shop. Five hours of someone tugging at your scalp is bad enough without every other person who comes in commenting on how tired you look.

I head into my room and open the sealed plastic bag that contains my clothes—after the first couple of bedbug scares, I’m not taking any chances. I check the baseboards of the apartment and the furniture every few days, too. Drea says I’m being crazy, which isn’t my favorite descriptor after what happened in Seattle, but she’s seemingly immune to them. She doesn’t have clusters of cocoa butter–resistant scars marring her neck and ankles. She doesn’t start itching every time she sees a tiny dark mote from the corner of her eye. And she doesn’t lie in bed at night wondering why the mattresses out on the curb are quickly being followed by moving trucks.

I do.

I lock up the house, cringing as Josie yells at her kid, or her dog, or her husband, and head to the community garden to make sure everything is good.

By the time I get there, I’m already sweating through my T-shirt. It’s hot and humid and there’s no way I’m walking all the way to the salon in this heat.

Ms. Candace is in there with Paulette. She’s picking some tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers from her plot, dropping them into a basket in Paulette’s lap. Paulette’s dark eyes lock on me as I stop at the entrance, but she doesn’t say anything. Her gaze strays toward the toolshed, then she looks down.

You’re imagining it, I tell myself, though more beads of sweat pop up along my hairline. The shadows of the sunflowers sway back and forth over the two women.

“Everything good? You need anything?” I ask.

Candace looks up at me and gives me a warm smile. “Everything’s good. We’re getting some salad makings for the Day Club Crew’s lunch later, isn’t that right?” She glances at Paulette, who doesn’t respond, then looks back at me. “What you up to?”

“Heading to the beauty supply, then the braid shop,” I say. “And then working on the tour some more.”

She rests her hands on her knees, examining me, and I know the concealer isn’t doing its work. “Stay safe, okay?”

She’s told me this countless times since I was little, but this time it seems like an actual request.

“I will.”

I look over the garden one more time before I turn to leave; all the plots, except the one I’m tending, are thick with green and red and orange foliage. Honeysuckle climbs over archways, shading the gravel pathways. Sunflowers, Mommy’s favorite, stand tall and heavy-headed along the back edge.

The three-block walk to the beauty supply to pick up my hair feels like I’m moving underwater. It strikes me when I’m walking that several of the stores on just this short stretch are new. The West Indian fruit and veggie store is still here, as are the patty shop and the nail salon, but the pet store where I got my first goldfish is gone. The barbershop where older men used to congregate and play jazz records is now a home goods boutique. And the halal market is a thrift shop that has price tags more expensive than neighboring stores that sell brand-new items.

I start walking faster, pushing through the fatigue as a single terrifying thought possesses me: What if the beauty supply is gone? I passed it two days ago, but . . .

I speed walk that final half a block and feel a sense of disproportionate relief when I catch sight of the pink awning with BEAUTYLAND written across it in bold white letters.

I step into the air-conditioning, out of breath and out of it. I wander through the aisles, my pulse racing for absolutely no reason and the panic trying to get a tight hold on my sweat-slick body, but eventually it loses its hold on me.

“Hey. You okay?” the older woman behind the counter asks as she rings me up, then gestures toward the fridge near the register. “Want to add a Red Bull?”

This store has been here for years, and this woman has never asked me how I was doing. I must look a mess, but Red Bull is the last thing my jackrabbit heart rate needs right now.

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

She nods, though her expression shows she disagrees.

The salon is a fifteen-minute walk from the beauty supply since my stylist moved to a cheaper storefront, and I decide to do myself a favor and order an Uber. I’ll have to wait . . . six minutes for Terrel in his Nissan Altima, but it’s hot as balls and I already feel dizzy from the short walk to the main drag of stores.

My phone vibrates and I check it.

Terrel has canceled the ride.

“Okay, fuck you too, Terrel,” I mutter, wondering if I really need my hair braided. Then, in what feels like a miracle given the general bullshit that has been my life lately, I immediately get a new alert.

Your driver is arriving in 1 min. Look for Drew in a black Ford Crown Victoria.

Someone lays on the horn, and I jump and look up to see the Crown Vic idling at the curb in front of me. He honks again, then again, and I hurry over and pull open the rear door.

“Drew?”

An older white guy wearing a Red Sox cap and reflective aviators looks back over his shoulder at me. “Yup. Sydney?”

I get in and he jerks into traffic, making me almost fall to my side before I can finish getting my seat belt on.

I snap it into place and shoot him a look in the rearview mirror, but he’s staring resolutely ahead and his aviators reveal nothing. My annoyance starts to grow as I realize there was no damn reason for him to be honking like that when he arrived.

I look around the car’s interior. It’s old, with no decorative accents. Instead of the usual air freshener scent, it smells . . . antiseptic. The hairs on my arms rise. When I glance at him again, I notice how the hair at the back of his thick neck is cut—shaved close to the skin with brutal efficiency, like a crew cut.

“Man, things have changed around here,” he says as we roll to a stop at a red light, pointing to a billboard for an upcoming luxury condominium. The ad features a white woman with sleeve tattoos relaxing in a luxurious bathtub, and the BVT Realty logo that can be seen on most new builds around here is stamped in the corner.

“Yeah,” I say tersely, wishing I’d had time to put in my earphones.

“You don’t like the change?” he asks.

“I grew up here. I don’t like people getting pushed out of their homes by rising rent and property tax,” I say, even though I should keep my mouth shut.

“Ohhh,” he says as the light turns green and he starts driving again. “Were you one of the people who protested?”

“No.”

He laughs. “Good. It didn’t get them anywhere, did it?”

Everything about this conversation is making me regret my life choices, so I decide to bury myself in my phone. When I try to navigate away from the app screen my phone doesn’t respond. I stare at the picture of the man in the driver photo—if it’s my current driver, he’s put on a lot of bulk since the picture was taken. There’s a license plate on the screen, but I realize I didn’t have time to check if it matched, since he’d hurried me into the car.

“The way I see it, it’s just . . . Darwin,” Drew says easily. “Survival of the fittest. You can’t protest that shit.”

The click of the doors locking echoes in the car as a punctuation to his statement and my hands reflexively curl into fists.

“Why did you lock the doors?” I ask.

“Those are the child safety locks, they kick in automatically after a while,” he says.

I glance through the window, willing myself to calm down. This feels wrong, all wrong, but after we pass this corner we’ll be just a few blocks away and it’s a straightaway on a busy Brooklyn thoroughfare. I’ve been extra jumpy lately and I had an unprovoked panic attack over a beauty supply shop. I’m probably just being paranoid.

“You find something nefarious in everything,” Marcus’s voice echoes in my head. “Then you wonder why I call you crazy.”

Drew suddenly whips a left onto a side street.

“What are you doing? The beauty shop is straight down this street.”

“My GPS said there was an obstacle on Fulton, so I decided to take another route. Don’t worry about it.”

There’s no damn GPS in this car. It has a radio with a cassette deck and his cell phone is facedown in the cubbyhole below it.

“Pull over,” I demand in the steadiest voice I can manage.

“We’re almost there,” he says in a calm down tone. “But like I was saying, it’s survival of the fittest. This part of Brooklyn has been riddled with crime for decades: drugs, shooting, theft. We don’t have those problems where I live because we understand the order of things. We follow the law. Back when I was a cop, I hated patrolling this neighborhood.”

“Pull. Over.”

I search for the lock on the door next to me, but there’s a hole where it should be sticking out. Sick fear pools in my stomach as I jiggle the handle, but Drew keeps talking.

“I always thought it would be a great place to live if there were just more . . . civilized people. Right?”

He makes a right and the car glides down a street with barely any traffic that’s lined with garages, industrial buildings, and half-erected condos.