Chapter 4

The bus was almost empty. Nadia sat in the back row with the blazer folded over her knees and watched the city slide past the rain-streaked windows — the towers of Manhattan thinning into brownstones, the brownstones thinning into the low sprawl of Queens, the lights going from gold to white to the tired fluorescent yellow of the streets her sister's building sat on. She had made this ride a hundred times, always the same seat, always the same folded posture, but tonight the weight of the blazer on her knees kept pulling her attention back to what she was carrying.

The brasserie ring. She had looked at it in the lobby of the bus, turning it over in her palm. It was heavy, warm, engraved on the inside with a single word: *Calloway*. It was the kind of thing a man wore every day and never took off, and Darius had left it in the pocket of the blazer he had wrapped around her. She did not know if that was deliberate. She did not know if he had emptied his pockets before he crossed the floor, or if the ring had just been there, forgotten in the fold of the coat.

She did not know if it was meant as a message or an accident, and the not-knowing sat in her chest like a second heart.

Her sister's building rose up out of the wet dark — a six-story walk-up with a flickering sign over the door that said *BELLMORE ARMS* in letters that were missing the B and the second M. Nadia climbed the steps to the third floor, and the blazer over her arm felt heavier with every stair.

The door opened before she could knock. Her sister stood in the doorway in a worn bathrobe, her dark hair pulled back, her face pinched with worry.