The woman steps closer to her husband, as if she’s scared of being attacked.

“This isn’t a very hospitable welcome,” the husband says in the same tone he used to chastise Count. “And if you want to continue, you should know I’m close friends with the chief of police.”

“Sydney, come on,” I say, doing my own Country Club Chad parody. “Let’s go to my place.”

She resists my tug at her arm, then whirls up the steps to her house and down the hall.

“Oh wait. You’re Kim’s latest? Weren’t you at the house last summer?” the husband asks while Sydney’s gone. “She always picks up the most interesting playthings. I guess you do, too.”

“You know Kim?”

His brow wrinkles. “Of course—”

“Charlie! Go make sure the movers don’t break that. It’s been in my family for years and he just dropped it without a second thought!”

Charlie gives me a strange look, the look you give someone when you greet them like a friend and then realize they’re just a similar-looking stranger.

He and his wife head over to the moving truck, tugging Count along with them, and Sydney storms back down the stairs with my duffel bag over her shoulder, various papers shoved haphazardly inside. She glances at Charlie and his wife as they stand next to a giant carved-wood African statue that the movers are about to take up the stairs.

I guide Sydney into my house—Kim’s house—and into the first-floor apartment. Which isn’t a cauldron that hasn’t been cleaned for a month, like mine. Sydney and I push aside the expensive curtains and glare at the people who claim they bought a house that wasn’t for sale.

Terry and Josie wander over with Arwin and Toby, greeting the newcomers with a combination of air kisses and firm handshakes.

Sydney pushes past me and drops onto the couch. “Am I going crazy? Please tell me the truth, because I already thought I was, but this feels like I’m going crazy for real.”

I flex my hands, breathing slowly, trying to collect my thoughts. Mr. Perkins was so kind and welcoming to me, and constant, and now he’s just gone.

“I was at the meeting,” I say. “He had no plans to move, and he wouldn’t leave his dog if he did. If you’re crazy, I’m crazy, too.”

She covers her face with her hands for a few minutes and I don’t push her; a moment of quiet wouldn’t hurt either of us right now.

Eventually, she sighs shakily through her fingers and her head pops up.

“I’m thinking about the tour,” she says, which is maybe the last thing I expect her to say.

“The tour? You still want to do it tomorrow?” I can’t keep the edge of you’re kidding me out of my voice.

“We looked up a lot of history. We talked to a lot of people. And some of those things are ringing bells for me now.”

She looks at me for a long moment, as if waiting for me to guess, but I have no clue what she’s talking about.

“I researched the past and present of Gifford Place. Of Brooklyn. I wanted to throw my middle finger up at Zephyr, at VerenTech, at . . . at you.”

I get what she means, but it still chafes. “At gentrification.”

She nods. “But I hadn’t found the thing that ties it together. The hook, like brownstones, or famous architects, or whatever. And if I’m right, this hook is fucking old and sharp. There are patterns in all of these situations that were just going to be stops on the tour, spiraling out from the beginning.” She pauses, licks her lips. “None of this is happening by chance. How could it?”

“What do you mean?” I ask. I told her I would believe her, but I’d already dealt with Kim’s paranoia—

Kim’s words slam into me.

“There are just so few of us.”

“We need to know whether there’s anything to worry about. Safety-wise.”

They had a private group on OurHood . . . What for?

Charlie knows Kim. Knows me.

Sydney kicks the coffee table that I’ve always hated away from the couch, pulls my duffel between her legs, and starts picking through the mess of papers. When she speaks, her words spill out in a rush.

“Okay. Boom. Remember when you came to Mr. Perkins’s before the meeting and I was reading about Underhill? Well, no, you wouldn’t remember that, but this is what I was reading.” She pulls out an old yellowed pamphlet. “It’s this British dude jerking off about how great killing Native Americans is so you can take their land and about how America is great because it’s so uninhabited. The cognitive dissonance of that, right? He wouldn’t be out there killing Native Americans if no one was on the land. He was a mercenary for the colonizers, basically, and the Dutch hired him to kill the Natives around here. He helped pave the way for New York City as it is now.”

“Okay.” I take the pamphlet and stare at it, going along with her but worried for the first time that her beliefs are going to fall into the “all in her head” category. “So, this was in the 1600s?”

“Yes,” she says. “Now think about the info from the heritage center. The laws preventing Black people from passing down property they owned to their children were put in place in the 1700s. Weeksville was founded in the 1800s because you had to own land to vote, which is why they made it so hard for Black people to own land.” She’s nodding as she talks. “The people in Weeksville build a whole community, and then boom, suddenly the government just has to plow right through with Eastern Parkway, like no one lived there? Just like they did with the indigenous people. Just like they’ve done with so many communities when you do even the most basic Google search for this. Central Park was built on a Black community. I am leaving a whole lot out right now, but it’s like this cycle repeating over and over again.”

“Hey. Maybe we need to just think on this a bit,” I say.

“You don’t see the pattern? I thought you said we were both crazy. Damn it, Theo.” She plucks a packet of papers out, flips a few pages, and then shakes it at me. “These are internal documents from the VerenTech Pharma proposal. Compare this description of the neighborhood and Underhill’s little manifesto.”

Her eyes are wide, begging me to make the connection, so I glance back and forth between the two pieces of evidence she’s given me.

“Okay, are you saying you think some dude from the 1600s is involved in the VerenTech Pharmaceuticals headquarters?”

She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose before speaking.

“No! I’m saying that this VerenTech memo feels like the same thing. How they talk about all the resources in the neighborhood that are underutilized, even though we’re right fucking here? And now Abdul is gone and some racist motherfucker owns the bodega. Mr. Perkins—the Mayor of Gifford Place—supposedly just up and moved, without telling a single soul?”

“Where did you even get this from?” I ask, flipping through the pages.

Her hand slaps to her mouth then.

“Oh no. Fuck.” She pulls out her phone, swipes around, and her face falls. “Drea. I got it from Drea. She’s been typing for like three fucking days!”

I look at her, hunched over her phone, eyes wide, body taut with terror. I should get far away from here, right now. This is above my pay grade. I was going along with her, but right now she’s possibly having a psychotic break. Something is going on here, though, even if Sydney’s behavior is freaking me out.

I think of William Bilford mimicking the kaboosh of a nuclear bomb.

“Remember what you said about how you got caught at your company?” Sydney’s voice is suddenly dull. “That you triggered some internal system, or something?”

She gently pulls the VerenTech pages from my hand, flips to the first document, and reads it. “‘The Company (VerenTech) acknowledges that this Memorandum is a public record subject to disclosure but do hereby require that we be notified of any and all FOIA requests, both during the city selection process and in the event that a city is chosen, to allow the Company to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy.’”

“Other appropriate remedy,” I repeat, taking the papers back from her. That seems like something designed to scare people on its own, but along with everything else it’s kind of ominous. “You know, there is a chance that Drea ran off. She’s an adult.”

“She wouldn’t,” Sydney says, a sudden fierceness in her tone. “It’s possible she made a mistake, but we’ve been friends for half of our lives. She’s never let me down and she sure as hell wouldn’t run from me.”

The look in her eye is how my mom looked at me when she’d let her asshole boyfriend move back in after telling me he was gone for good—indignation, hope, and desperation.