A ripple of repulsion passes over my skin, leaving itchiness in its wake.

I run for a giant plastic bag from under the kitchen sink, force myself to ball the duvet up around the mass of bugs, and shove it into the bag, then run it outside after double-bagging it four times over.

I don’t think as I’m doing it, or feel. I’m on autopilot, just like last time . . .

I don’t know how much time passes after that. I search every crevice of her bed, her floorboards, her closet, but find no other evidence of the bugs.

I start to shove her clothes into bags to be heat-treated, but it’s too much.

I’m overwhelmed and she might not appreciate me all up in her stuff, especially since she already thinks I’m unhealthily obsessed with the bedbugs. I didn’t take a picture. By the time she comes home, I’m going to look like a maniac who threw away her favorite duvet out of spite.

She’s already suggesting therapy and I need to calm down. I don’t think she would hurt me purposely, like Marcus did, but the bite of restraints against my wrists isn’t something I want to feel again.

I place her clothes back into their cubbyholes and try to get the closet back to the neat state it was in before I tore through it looking for bedbugs. When I have it back in order, I pick up a few slips of paper that drifted out from the bottom-left cubby.

A receipt from the old Foodtown that’s currently being renovated so it can be reopened as a Whole Foods–type supermarket. A phone number and smiley face scrawled on a ripped scrap of paper with a blue ballpoint pen. An ATM deposit slip for fifty thousand dollars.

Fifty thousand dollars.

Drea tells me about all her side hustles, and especially if they pay even remotely well.

Fifty thousand dollars. What would pay that well and in a lump sum?

But this was from around the time I was in the deepest shit with Marcus. Maybe I’d forgotten, or she hadn’t wanted to rub it in while I was suffering. Yeah, that makes sense.

There’s a scan of the check itself on the receipt, which is dated from before I’d returned home. The name of the company it was issued by is hard to read at first, or maybe I just don’t want to see it, but it’s all too familiar to me.

I stare at it for a long moment, trying to reconcile it with what I know of the company. Drea would never . . .

She would never.

She’ll explain when she gets back. Of course there’s an explanation.

I march mindlessly back to the apartment downstairs and barricade myself in my bedroom with a bottle of wine and my cell phone. I wrap my hands in socks to keep from hurting myself as I scratch at imagined bugs crawling over my skin, and I jump at imaginary flecks of black just out of my line of sight. I can’t distract myself with TV because I need to hear if there are any more noises in the building, but I take a sip every time the possibility of what that check means pops into my mind.

By the time the sun rises, the bottle is empty, I haven’t slept a wink, and Drea still hasn’t come home.

Gifford Place OurHood post by Kaneisha Bell:

I just want to put out there that a strange white man showed up at my door and asked to come in and do a “valuation” of my house. This was the first I’d heard of any of this, so I didn’t let him in. I called the police, and they said they’d send someone out to get a statement, but no one ever came. Everyone keep an eye out.

Candace Tompkins: @Fitzroy Sweeney @Gracie Todd

Asia Martin: That is scary as fuck. Do you think he was trying to do a home invasion?

Josie Ulnar: No, no, we had our home valuated last week and it’s fine. They just come in and take a look around. It’s so they can figure out the property tax. You have to let them in.

Asia Martin: We don’t have to do shit, actually.

Chapter 13

Theo

“NORTH AMERICA. BRAZIL. THE DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY was founded explicitly to wage economic warfare. It’s in their charter. I thought the Dutch were a neutral people, but maybe I was thinking of the Swiss.”

Sydney grunts a response. Her behavior is worrying me. I’ve been talking for ten minutes straight and she hasn’t smiled, hasn’t made fun of me, hasn’t responded to the Dutch West India Company facts I’m spouting to impress her.

She stares into space as she waters the sunflowers along the edge of the community garden, the dark circles under her eyes so startling that my stomach twisted at first glance, mistaking them for black eyes. I’m starting to wonder if she’s slept at all this week—it’s hard not to notice that she’s more fidgety and fatigued every time I see her.

I’m also wondering why her problems, which she hasn’t asked for help with, are making me so antsy.

I keep talking.

“But the craziest thing I found was that a lot of these guys made their money from slaves—uh, enslaved people.”

“Duh. I thought you were supposed to be good at research,” she says. I can tell she’s trying for a jab, but it lands more like a weak poke.

I press on, trying to revive the Sydney who’s so passionate about history.

“Well, that’s not the crazy thing. After slavery ended, all these guys needed new jobs, so they just moved into the banking sector, even founding some of them. Like you know Veritas Bank? Started by a Brooklyn-Dutch former slave master. You told me before that the banks were all tied up in slavery, when you talked about that crash, but it’s like all these guys never gave up much power, they just . . .” I struggle to find the right way to say this, the right words to convey how royally fucked this is. “They just put on a different suit. Things didn’t change that much. They were still controlling all the money, and in a way they were still controlling the people they didn’t own anymore, because they controlled who got money, where money was invested. And one of the Veritas directors even lived in this neighborhood! His last name was Vriesendaal, like the old sanitarium.”

“Wow,” she says, but there’s no excitement in her voice. None of the passion from when she showed me her ideas, or even when she interrupted during the brownstone tour. “Good work. I can use that.”

I keep talking. You can usually talk people out of bad moods, just like you can talk them into other things. Keep the words flowing at a steady pace. Lull them into a kind of distracted comfort, or push them into annoyance. Either way, their reaction is under your control.

“And what kind of name is Usselincx, the name of the guy who founded the company? It sounds like the super-obvious villain in a movie. ‘Mwahaha, my name is Usselincx and I came here to steal land and get trounced by the British, and I’m all out of—’”

“Theo.” She cuts a glance at me through squinted eyes. “You’re wandering very close to the borders of Howdy Doody Land, and also tap-dancing just next to my last nerve. Step lightly.”

I shouldn’t be happy to have drawn this reaction from her, but that’s the first time she’s looked remotely up-and-at-’em today. I do my best approximation of a soft shuffle next to a patch of lettuce and she playfully swerves the spray of water in my direction, though she makes sure not to get me wet.

I feel slightly ridiculous for having just literally tap-danced for a woman I supposedly don’t care about, but her expression is a little less taut, and there’s a bit of light in her eyes.

She turns off the hose and wipes her hands over her shorts—longer cutoffs than she’s worn the past few days, accentuating her hips and thighs without revealing them. I take a deep breath and pull my thoughts in the opposite direction.

“Ready to meet the Day Club Crew and pump them for history?” she asks.

“Let’s go.”

WHEN WE GET to Candace’s house, I hate that I’m shocked at how nice it is, mostly because the outside is so markedly in a state of disrepair. I wouldn’t have picked this as one of the nicest places on the block, and I excel at that. Kim had always been annoyed by this house, saying it was being wasted. She would have thought differently if she’d stopped being a jerk long enough to be invited inside.

The inner door is glass embedded in dark wood, allowing you to see into the bright open-plan living room/dining room/kitchen area that takes up the floor.

The walls are an elegant eggshell and the furniture all looks expensive and classy. A long window along the kitchen wall floods the entire floor with sunlight from the backyard. It looks like a picture from the Boomtown app, except there are Black people in the frame.