In November 2024 I had gone back to a client I did not like, at a rate below what I was worth, because we needed the money.

That autumn, Brenda took a week in Cabo.

I remember the photographs.

And underneath all of it, the actual arithmetic of that apartment, which nobody ever said out loud: I was paying for six adults and a child, and had been told I was paying for four, and the difference was going to the woman who eventually held my daughter down in a kitchen chair.

Naomi said, on the phone: “Do you understand what this means for the criminal side?”

“That she needed money.”