Something in her right side gave — not the fascia, she found out later, but the outer closure, three of the staples pulling through the skin — and she went down onto her knees on the Petrossians’ balcony with both hands over her mouth and stayed there for ninety seconds, breathing through her nose, while blood soaked slowly into the waistband of her clothes.

The Petrossians’ balcony door was unlocked, because the Petrossians were seventy-eight and eighty-one and had lived in that building since 1988 and had never once locked an interior door in their lives.

Maya went through their dark apartment barefoot, past their photographs and their good furniture under sheets, and let herself out their front door into the shared hallway, and went down the back stairs in her socks, and out the service door into the alley.

She stood in the alley in the blue of the evening with no shoes, no phone, no money, and no identity documents, holding her right side, forty feet from her own front stoop.