It could only be sold.

By her.

Or by someone the county believed was her.

Maya met Mark Sterling — he took her name at marriage, which everyone found charming, and which she would later understand had been the first free thing he ever got from her — in the autumn of a bad year.

She was thirty-four.

She had been working the dispensary counter at a hospital-adjacent pharmacy for six years.

It was raining hard enough that the gutters were backing up, and a man in a black suit who had just dropped a passenger at the medical building offered her a lift, and she said no, and he waited anyway, and she said yes.