2

When Mirella was a child, she lived with her mother and her older sister, Susanna, in a duplex in exurban Ohio. The housing development was located in a territory composed of strip malls and big-box stores. Farmland extended to the back of the Walmart parking lot. Some miles away, there was a prison. Mirella’s mother worked two jobs and spent very little time at home. In the early mornings—well before dawn in the wintertime—Mirella and Susanna’s mother rose after a few hours of sleep, poured milk over her daughters’ cereal and did their hair while blearily drinking coffee, and drove them to school. She kissed her daughters goodbye and they were at school for the next ten hours—early drop-off, then school, then after-school programming—until at the end of the afternoon they boarded a bus that dropped them a half-mile from home.

It was a bad half-mile. They had to walk under an overpass. The overpass scared Mirella, but in all the years she lived there, from when she was five until she dropped out of school and took a bus to New York City at sixteen, there was only one truly terrible incident. Mirella was nine, which made Susanna eleven, and they did hear the gunshots as the school bus pulled away, but the sounds were clear only in retrospect. In the moment, they looked at each other in the winter twilight and Susanna shrugged. “Probably just a car backfiring or something,” she said, and Mirella, who would have believed anything Susanna told her, took her sister’s hand and they walked together. Snow was falling. The mouth of the overpass was a dark cave waiting to swallow them. It’s fine, Mirella told herself, it’s fine, it’s fine, because it was always fine, but this particular time it wasn’t. As they stepped into the shadows, the sound came once more, impossibly loud now. They stopped.

Two men lay on the ground a few yards ahead of them. One was perfectly still; the other was twitching. In the dim light, at this distance, she couldn’t see exactly what had happened to them. A third man was sitting slumped against the wall, a handgun dangling loose in his hand. A fourth was running away—his footsteps echoed—but Mirella glimpsed him for only an instant, scrambling up the embankment at the far end of the overpass and out of sight.

For a long time all of them—Mirella, Susanna, the man with the gun, the two dead or dying men on the ground—were frozen in a winter tableau. How much time? It felt like forever. Hours, days. The man with the gun had a sleepy, sedated look about him; his head nodded forward once or twice. Then came the police lights, blue and red washing over him, and this seemed to wake him up. He stared at the gun in his hand, as if unsure how it had arrived there, then he turned his head, and looked directly at the girls.

“Mirella,” he said.

Then came shouting and confusion, a swarm of dark uniforms—“Drop your weapon! Drop your weapon!”—and although the event objectively happened, she and Susanna really were interviewed by the police, and there really was a story in the papers the next day (“Two Shot Dead Under Overpass: Suspect in Custody”), it was easy to convince herself in the years that followed that she’d only imagined this last part, that he hadn’t really said her name. How could he have known her name? Susanna didn’t remember hearing anything.

But all these years later, in the back of a Manhattan-bound taxi, safe in another life, here was a certainty she couldn’t shake: the man in the tunnel was Gaspery Roberts.

She closed her eyes, trying to relax, but her phone vibrated in her hand. A text from her girlfriend: Are you coming to Jess’s party?

It took a moment to remember. She texted back—On my way—and waved to catch the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror.

“Excuse me.”

“Ma’am?” he said, a little wary because she’d just been crying.

“May I give you a new destination? I need to get to Soho.”