Review of the door-cam footage, store surveillance, and the in-app microphone override make it clear that we can’t wait any longer. We can find another explanation, but if we don’t move now, the entire project is in jeopardy. Geolocation shows Green is moving toward the house marked next for clearance.

Chapter 19

Sydney

I JOG ACROSS THE STREET IN THE DARKENING EVENING LIGHT, hiding between parked cars to watch a black sedan with tinted windows that slows, then keeps driving. Was it Drew? What would happen if I ended up in the back seat of his car again? I doubt he’d let me out this time, and a key between my fingers probably won’t cut it.

Toby barks from somewhere behind me, and I turn and look up. On either side of my house, Mommy’s house, the brownstones are inhabited by strangers who are no longer just new neighbors, but likely people who want to do me harm.

A siren whines to life a few blocks away and I flinch. The roar of a jet engine overhead makes me wonder if they might have drones watching us.

Everything seems like it might be a means to hurt me. Every. Goddamn. Thing.

Laughter tinkles through the window of Josie and Terry’s house, and that’s the rage straw on the camel’s back for me.

I came back to Brooklyn to find home, and these bastards have taken even the comfort of the familiar from me. Taken my mother’s dignity, and my best friend’s loyalty, and my community. I can never get those things back, and they think they’ll get away with it because no one cares.

They don’t count my pain, our pain, in their idea of care.

They’re gonna learn today.

I jog up the stairs to my front door, the key slipping out of the lock two times before I manage to turn it.

Once the door is shut and locked behind me, I stand for a moment and take several deep breaths, filling my nose with the familiar scent of potpourri, wood polish, and dust that always made coming home feel real. Even though it’s the opposite of what I would normally do, I slip on the pair of old Timbs I usually wear while gardening and never wear into the house. I don’t know what’s going on, and you can’t stomp someone with Old Navy flip-flops.

I jog up to Mommy’s apartment, and when I open the door, I’m hit with the stale, stifling hot air of an un-air-conditioned top floor. Sweat beads on my brow as I close the door and engage the multiple locks. The duffel bag rests against my hip as I scan the apartment, and a sudden vibration makes me jump about a foot in the air before I realize it’s my phone.

Fucking Theo.

My jaw clenches and I beeline for Mommy’s bedroom, the one place in the house I haven’t been since that night. The room is simple, light blue with a dark wood bedroom set and a rarely used vanity, the kind with lightbulbs around the mirror. It made me feel so glamorous as a kid when I’d sit in front of it, cataloguing the features that were so similar to those of the woman I thought was the prettiest in the world, and sneaking dabs of her lipstick and blush.

It’s dark in the room, even though the blinds aren’t closed—it’s already evening, somehow, as if time has stopped making sense along with everything else I thought I knew.

Her bedroom window sits in the faux-parapet, the high tower, where I can look down on those who might come to get me. Where I once watched my friends pretend to battle to save me.

No one’s fighting for that job now.

I stand in the doorway, staring down at Mommy’s bed, my teeth pressed together so hard that I feel like they might crumble. The bed is bare except for its mattress cover because we used her favorite blanket to wrap her up.

Drea had helped, had given me the recommendation for the lawyers, had promised to help me fight to keep the house. She said she didn’t know why Mommy had agreed to sign over the house, and Mommy had never mentioned Drea pressuring her—but pressure wasn’t always blatant.

Drea’d betrayed us, gotten paid, pretended to care, and then left me to fight this alone.

Has she pretended to be my friend all this time? Has she hated me all these years when I’d thought of her as a sister? Did she tell them where the body was, and that’s why Mommy is missing?

Wait. Theo is the one who told me her body wasn’t there. That might be a lie too. Everything could be a lie.

I purposefully unclench my jaw and take a deep breath. No time for memories, or for questions.

I’m in Mommy’s room for a reason.

I head for her closet, pull down one of the familiar blue cookie tins as the persistent vibration of my phone purrs in the duffel on the window seat. No, this tin is too light. Must be her sewing things. I place it back on the shelf—Mommy did not tolerate me digging through her belongings and I learned as a child to put things back exactly as they were.

I find what I’m looking for in the fourth cookie tin I pick up, the heaviest one, the one with things rolling around like marbles inside.

I place it on the bed, sweat rolling down my temples and pooling beneath my titties from the top-floor heat of this room, and fight with the slightly rusted lid, eventually winning the battle. The lid pulls free and there it is. Mommy’s little silver revolver. It’s not shiny anymore, how I remember it, and it’s old enough that people would clown me if I posted a pic of it on social media, but I’m not pulling it out for social media clout.

My grandfather had given the gun to her when she’d come up north, but she’d known how to use it since she could walk. That’s what she told me, at least. Her parents taught her how to hunt for food, and how to protect herself when the white boys from town got bored and came cruising through their neighborhood looking to do evil, or if the Brown boys she’d grown up with suddenly didn’t understand the word no.

I pick it up, the heft of it a familiar comfort that grounds me in the swirling tornado of my thoughts and fears. Mommy taught me how to use it early, and then taught me never to touch it unless there was an emergency.

I think she’d agree this counts, given what I know of her definition of emergency.

Fitzroy told us the story of Mommy making a man dance at the end of this gun during the blackout. He probably didn’t know she’d run my daddy off the same way. I only found out the truth toward the end of things. We’d been watching Goodfellas in her bed, and during the scene where Karen shoves a gun into Henry’s mouth as he’s sleeping after she finds out he’s cheating, Mommy laughed so hard she’d lost her breath. I forced her to take a few sips of water and asked what was so funny.

“Just . . . memories. That’s how your daddy woke up after the first and last time he hit me,” she said, her gaze soft and unfocused and the slightest smile on her face.

“I wish I’d told you that earlier. How to treat men who want to make you small, crush you under their heel.” She looked into my eyes, her gaze loving but hard. “I put my gun in your daddy’s mouth and I made him apologize. And then I told him, ‘If you ever hit me again, you better kill me, because next time I won’t hesitate to pull this trigger.’ He left not long after that. Before he knew about you.”

I grasp the bullets from the box in the tin with clumsy fingers and load them into the chamber, thinking of all the people who think they can hurt everybody else with no consequence. Most times they’re right. They live long, successful lives while using other people’s necks as ladder rungs.

I don’t have a plan just yet, but this is not going to be one of those times, if I can help it. I’m not going to let VerenTech, Josie and Terry, Ponytail Lululemon, or anyone else continue to take what’s mine.

Something flashes into my eyes through the window as I push the chamber back into place with the heel of my hand. Theo is in his window across the street, eyes wide and waving around a mirror with a flashlight pointed at it, some kind of Boy Scout trick to get my attention. I give him the finger, jamming it up into the air hard and then pressing it to the glass as my rage at his betrayal flares up in me.

I expected him to have dropped the act already, but his hair is on end and his face is flushed as he tosses the mirror and picks up his phone, waving his other arm and pointing at me, waving and then pointing at the phone. I can see that confused brow knit of his from all the way over here.

I shake my head, pissed off that he has the nerve to look legitimately distressed, but I don’t take my eyes off him even as I stick the Ziploc baggie of bullets into my pocket.

He bangs his windowpane and because his window is open, I hear him when he yells something in frustration.

“Please!”

And because I’m not my mother’s daughter, just her diluted progeny, I second-guess myself. One doubt is all it takes. I pick up the phone when it vibrates again.

“Sydney, what the—” He reins himself in, and through the window I see him drop his hand onto his hip in an almost comical way. “You need to get out of your house now. He’s downstairs. Can you go down a fire escape? He’s in the house.”