Before he left, she asked for his number, and he gave it, and he assumed that was the strange and surreal end of the whole thing.

Chapter 7 — The Invitation

Three days later a black Navigator pulled up in front of his small repair shop.

A suited driver stepped out and handed him a heavy cream envelope.

Inside was an invitation, in a careful hand: Ifeoma wanted to see him, urgently, at her house in Beacon Hill.

The following afternoon Emeka sat across from her in a sunlit drawing room that looked out over the public garden, a room that probably cost more than his whole building, and listened to her make a proposal so strange he was sure he’d misheard it.