Chapter 8

*This is just a little scare that we gave you. Pay up. Next time it lands you in your grave.*

I read it twice.

Then I put the phone face-down in my palm, looked straight ahead at the traffic moving past the hospital entrance, and breathed.

There were people everywhere. A woman pushing a stroller. A man in scrubs eating something wrapped in foil. An elderly couple moving slowly toward the automatic doors. None of them were looking at me.

None of them knew that the woman standing on this pavement with a cracked phone and bruised ribs had been dead three days ago.

I breathed again.

Victor Dane. The name rose from Lilian's memory clean and cold, the way your body remembered danger before your mind caught up to it, a tightening across the shoulders, a low instinct that said *this one is serious*. Frank Hayes had borrowed from Dane's operation over a period of three years, the debt quietly snowballing the way debt did when you couldn't touch the principal. When Frank died, the balance transferred to his daughter without ceremony or consent, the way bad inheritances always did.

The parking lot. Lilian's ribs. *Accident*, the doctor had said.

It wasn't an accident. It was a demonstration.

I tucked the phone into my pocket, raised my hand at the first cab I saw, and got in.

---

The apartment was on the third floor of a building in Astoria that smelled like someone's cooking and old carpet and the particular cold of a place that didn't get much afternoon sun. I found the key under the loose tile exactly where Lilian's memory said it would be, and let myself in without fumbling, which was its own kind of strange, unlocking a door for the first time and knowing every movement in advance.

I stood in the middle of the living room and looked around.

Small. Tidy in the way of someone who didn't have enough things to be untidy. A couch that had seen better years but was clean. A kitchen visible through an open doorway, a single mug upside-down on the drying rack. A shelf of books, mostly paperbacks, a couple of them soft at the spines from re-reading. A framed photograph on the wall: a younger Lilian with a man who had her same jaw and tired, kind eyes. Her father, before the gambling took the kindness away.

I looked at the photo for a long time.

*She loved him,* I thought. *Even after everything.*

I understood that. I understood it in a way that had nothing to do with Lilian's memories and everything to do with my own father standing in a hospital corridor, unable to meet my eyes, carrying a secret that had cost me my life.

Love didn't protect you from people. It just made the betrayal land somewhere tender.

I sat on the couch and didn't move for a long time.

---

That night I went through everything.

Lilian's bank statements. Her pay stubs. A letter from Dane's operation, no letterhead, no names, just a typed figure and an account number, tucked between a utility bill and an expired gym membership she'd clearly never cancelled because cancelling things cost time she didn't have.

The figure was not impossible. It wasn't manageable either. It sat in the middle of those two things, in the specific territory of *only impossible if you're also paying rent and eating*, which she was, barely, on two part-time wages that didn't add up to enough.

I noticed, somewhere around midnight, that no one had texted to ask where she was.

No friend checking in. No coworker sending a quick *you okay?* No neighbor who'd heard she'd been in hospital. Just the delivery app notification from 5 days ago, still unread.

I set the phone down on the coffee table and looked at it for a moment.

Lilian Hayes had lived an entire life in this city, and the absence of her had gone completely unnoticed.

Eleanor Hale had left behind a best friend who would have burned down the building to find her, and she couldn't go back to any of it.

I turned off the light and lay down on Lilian's bed and stared at the ceiling until my eyes went heavy enough to close.

---

The daycare was on 35th, twenty minutes on the subway, a route Lilian's memory walked me through without effort.

The moment I pushed through the door, the noise hit me: small voices, the squeak of sneakers on a polished floor, someone crying with that particular toddler intensity that went from zero to devastating in one breath. The smell of paint and juice boxes and the faint sweetness of those antibacterial wipes that every childcare space in the city seemed to run on.

Something in my chest loosened that I hadn't realized was tight.

I'd spent four years wanting a child. Four years in waiting rooms and clinics and quiet kitchens, trying to understand why my body wouldn't do the one thing I was asking of it. And then nine months of finally, finally understanding what it felt like to have someone growing inside you, someone who turned at the sound of music and kicked when you ate something cold.

I'd had exactly one week left with her before everything ended.

"Lilian." A woman's voice, warm and slightly surprised. May Chen…Lilian's memory supplied her immediately. Mid-fifties, ran the daycare like a ship with an extremely firm but loving captain. She crossed the room with her arms out. "You look terrible, baby. Come here."

She hugged me before I could prepare for it.

I stood very still inside the hug and kept my eyes open, and breathed through my nose.

"I'm okay," I said, into her shoulder. "I'm okay."

"Mm." She pulled back and looked at my face with the unsentimental appraisal of someone who'd spent decades seeing through what children told her. "Your message said a family thing. I wasn't going to push."

"A message?"

"The one you sent on Tuesday." She was already walking back toward the supply room, gesturing for me to follow. "Took days off, family emergency. I just said of course, take your time."

Tuesday. I don't have a memory of that happening. But then I don't have to explain my absence.

I filed that away and followed May into the supply room.

"The Martins' little girl has been asking for you," May said, pulling boxes of craft supplies off a shelf. "You know how she gets. She wouldn't do the finger painting with anyone else."

"I'll go see her."

I spent the day doing things I didn't know I knew how to do and found that I did, tying shoe laces, reading picture books with the voices that made children tip their heads back laughing, sitting on the floor with a small girl named Rosie who had enormous serious eyes and very specific opinions about which colour the sky should be in her painting.

"Miss Lily," Rosie said, pressing a painty thumb firmly to the corner of the page, "do you have a little girl?"

The question went through me like a current.

"Not yet," I said.

*Yet.* As if that were still a word that applied to me.

"I think you'd be a good one," Rosie said, very seriously. "A good mummy."

I looked at her for a second, this small stranger with paint on her nose, and felt something shift in the back of my throat.

"Thank you, love," I said. "That's a very kind thing to say."

---

The bank was on Northern Boulevard. I made it there just before noon.

I sat across from a loan officer who had the practiced patience of someone who said no many times per day, and laid out what I had, Lilian's income, her employment history, the debt figure. He listened without interrupting, which I appreciated, because it meant I didn't have to watch him decide while I was still talking.

When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.

"Miss Hayes," he said, "I have to be honest with you. Given your credit profile and the existing balances, we're not able to approve a personal loan at this time."

"Is there anything…."

"I'm afraid not. Not without a cosigner or significant collateral." He folded his hands on the desk. "I'm sorry."

I thanked him. I stood. I walked back out through the glass doors.

---

The pavement outside the bank was wide and grey and entirely indifferent.

I stood at the top of the steps with my hands in my coat pockets and ran the numbers one more time, the way you poked a bruise to see if it still hurt.

It still hurt.

I had Lilian's wages, which wouldn't cover the debt in a year, let alone the window I'd been given. I had Eleanor's money, sitting in accounts attached to a dead woman's name that would trigger questions I couldn't answer if I went anywhere near them. I had a cracked phone and a key to an apartment that didn't belong to me and two days, maybe three, before Victor Dane sent someone to deliver a more permanent version of his message.

I was thinking about that, about how many ways there weren't to solve this, when I heard footsteps stop behind me.

"Excuse me, miss."

I turned slowly.

A man in a dark suit, late thirties, the kind of face that was hired for its neutrality. He was standing precisely far enough away not to crowd me, which told me he'd been trained to do that, which told me he worked for someone who understood that crowding scared people off.

"My employer would like to speak with you," he said. "He says it concerns something that may be to your mutual benefit."

I looked past him.

A car was parked at the kerb, long, black, the tinted windows giving nothing away. Expensive in the way that didn't need to announce itself.

"Your employer," I said. "Who's that?"

"He'd prefer to introduce himself."

Every single nerve in Lilian's body said *parking lot. Don't.*

But Eleanor's mind, which had spent 3 days running out of options, said something different.

"How long would it take?" I asked.

"Ten minutes. Perhaps less."

I looked at the car. Looked back at him. He didn't move, didn't push, just waited with his hands clasped in front of him like someone entirely comfortable with being told no.

That, more than anything, was what made me walk toward it.

He opened the back door.

The interior was dark leather and cool air and a scent that arrived before anything else did, something clean and woody and quiet, nothing I could name but something that settled over the space like the room had been occupied by the same person for a long time.

I sat down.

The door closed.

My eyes adjusted.

Before I could look properly at the man sitting across from me, before I could form a question or reach for the door handle or do anything at all…

"I want you to marry me."