It was six years of me being useful to people who were waiting for me to sign something.”

She had lost a husband who had never existed, a mother-in-law who had been performing, an apartment full of somebody else’s dinner, and the last of a certain kind of faith in sweet voices.

What she had instead was a boy who wouldn’t stop talking, a brother who called on Sundays, a business with her name nowhere on the sign, and a man who had told her the worst thing he had ever done to her while sitting at his own kitchen counter, on purpose, with witnesses, because he had decided that she was never again going to be the last person in the room to know something about her own life.

“Come on,” she said.

“He’s going to fall.”

And Leo, forty feet ahead, did not fall, and shouted back down the block that they were both extremely slow.