The affair was the least interesting fact in the entire case.

Men have affairs.

It is a shabby, ordinary thing, and if that had been all it was, Maya Sterling would have divorced her husband, sold nothing, kept the apartment, and been fine inside two years.

What made it what it was, was 2B.

Rosalie Sterling had been Maya’s great-aunt on her father’s side, a woman who taught high school chemistry for thirty-four years, never married, kept parakeets, and had bought a two-bedroom apartment in 1974 for eleven thousand dollars because a colleague told her that renting was throwing money in a hole.

By the time she died, that apartment — paid off since 1991, in a neighborhood that had gone from cheap to bad to interesting to unaffordable in the space of a single lifetime — was worth a little over six hundred thousand dollars.