Maya sold 2B eleven weeks later, to the same young couple, who had been living in a rental for a year and a half and who cried in the closing office.

It was a clean, transparent, painfully well-documented transaction, and Priya Raghunathan personally attended, and there were, at Maya’s insistence, three separate forms of identification presented by every human being at that table.

Part Fifteen: Bibi

She bought a house four blocks from Ellerby Lane.

Everyone assumed this was a romantic gesture and it was not, or not entirely.

It was a small brick house with a yellow door and a fig tree in the back that was never going to fruit that far north, and she bought it because it was the first place she had ever chosen for herself with money she had earned by surviving something.

Leo took it badly.