I know everything about her, he said.

Maya did not answer him.

She had learned, over a hard year and a half, that the people who most want you to react are the ones you owe the least, and that silence is not weakness but a door you are entitled to keep shut.

But she stood very still after they had taken him away, in the rain, at the bottom of the stairs, with her son’s hand in hers, because a man she had never met had spoken her name like a thing he owned, and had not been surprised to find her here, and that meant that tonight had not been random at all, and that the thread of it ran further back into her own life than a single flight across the Atlantic.

She did not yet know how far.