Chapter 6

Dante said she could send someone to pack Leo's things.

"I'll go myself," Ava said.

"There's no need. I can have..."

"I said I'll go."

A pause. The kind that meant he was deciding whether the argument was worth his time. Apparently it wasn't.

"I'll arrange a car," he said. "Two of Rafe's people."

"One."

"Two."

She didn't answer. He took that as agreement, which it wasn't, but she let it go because she needed the car more than she needed to win that particular exchange.

The car dropped her at the corner the way she asked and she walked the last half block alone, which was the whole point. The building looked exactly the same as it always had, same cracked step at the entrance, same intercom panel with the button for 3B still slightly sticky from where Leo had pressed a sticker onto it two years ago and she had never fully got it off. She let herself in and went up the stairs, and the third one creaked the same way it always creaked, and she put her hand on the banister that was slightly loose at the second floor the same way it had always been loose, and by the time she got to her door she had the specific feeling of walking back into a life that had already decided to move on without her.

She called Nadia from the landing.

"How is he?" she said when Nadia picked up.

"He's good. He's been asking about the new house since breakfast." Nadia paused. "He wants to know if there's a pool."

"There isn't."

"I didn't think so but I didn't want to be the one to tell him."

"Put him on."

Shuffling, a small thud, and then Leo's voice came through loud and immediate.

"Mom. Is there a pool?"

"No pool."

"What about a trampoline?"

"Also no."

"A slide?"

"Leo. It's a house, not a playground."

"Big houses have those things." He said it with complete confidence, like this was a documented fact he had researched thoroughly. "I looked it up."

"You can't read."

"I looked at the pictures." A pause. "Is Dante nice?"

She stood in the hallway outside her apartment door and leaned against the wall.

"He's fine," she said.

"Does he have a dog?"

"No."

"Can we get one?"

"Absolutely not."

"Why not?"

"Pack your rabbit," she said. "I'm coming to get you this afternoon."

"Okay." A beat. "Mom?"

"Yeah."

"Is it going to be weird?"

She looked at her apartment door. At the lock that stuck slightly to the left before it gave. At the number that had been crooked since she moved in and never been fixed.

"Probably," she said. "But we've done weird before."

"Yeah," he said, satisfied with that in the way he was satisfied with most honest answers, and handed the phone back.

"I'll have him ready by two," Nadia said.

"Thank you. For everything, Nadia. Really."

"Ava." Nadia's voice dropped. "Is everything okay? Actually okay?"

She thought about the microphone behind the vanity mirror. The door handle at midnight. The mansion corridor with its cameras and its blind spots and Rafe telling her in a voice low enough that the walls couldn't hear that the mic wasn't his team's work.

"I'll call you if it's not," she said.

She let herself into the apartment and stood in the center of it.

Four days. It feels like someone else lived here.

It was small the way she had always known it was small but hadn't fully felt until now, standing in it after four days in a house where a single corridor was wider than her living room. Leo's drawings on the fridge, held up with the dinosaur magnets he'd picked himself at the dollar store eighteen months ago. The crack in the ceiling above the sofa she had been meaning to report to the super for seven months. The radiator in the bedroom that knocked at six every morning like it was checking whether she was awake.

This is a real place. That house is a performance.

She packed Leo's room first, moving fast and efficiently the way she did everything when she was trying not to feel it. The rabbit with the missing ear, first, because forgetting it was not an option she was willing to consider. The drawings stuck to the wall. The blue pencil case. The dinosaur pyjamas. Enough clothes for a week because she was not coming back here for a while and she knew it even if she hadn't said it out loud yet.

She moved to the kitchen last.

Leo's cereal, the one with the cartoon on the box. The purple cup he used for everything and would notice immediately if it wasn't there. The snacks he liked, because the mansion kitchen was full of things Leo would look at and refuse on principle, and she wanted him to have something familiar in an unfamiliar place.

She pulled open the kitchen drawer for the tape and stopped.

Under the takeout menu from the dumpling place on the corner, folded in half and soft at the crease from sitting in the drawer, was a card she recognised before she fully understood what she was looking at.

The number. The reference code. Three years of payments encoded in ten digits she still knew by heart because some things get into your memory and stay there regardless of whether you want them.

But the name above the number was wrong.

That's not right. That's not the name.

She stood at the counter and looked at it for a long moment. Then she took out her phone and dialled the number.

Four rings. Then a flat recorded voice: "You've reached a number that is no longer in service."

She hung up.

She turned the card over. Blank on the back. She turned it back and looked at the name she had never seen before, sitting above the number she would never forget, and understood that the debt she had spent three years paying down had never belonged to the people she thought it belonged to.

Someone else had owned it the whole time.

She put the card in her jacket pocket and sealed the snack bag and picked up both bags and turned off the light.

Whose name is that.

She stopped on the third stair on the way down. The one that always creaked.

What if it's connected. What if none of this is coincidence.

She stood there for one second and then kept moving because standing on a creaking stair in her old building was not where she was going to figure it out, and Rafe's man was waiting at the corner, and Leo needed to be picked up by two.