Chapter 8: The Apartment

I hid in the hedge where I'd landed six nights before and called the number on the back of his card.

He picked up on the first ring, wide awake.

"Mirella?"

"I need a ride," I said. "And I'm going to get in your car."

He was there in thirty-one minutes, with his headlights off for the last quarter mile.

On the bridge he said, "Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Is the baby..."

"He found the picture. He knows."

The office kept a sublet in Brooklyn Heights for people who couldn't go home.

It was the top floor of a brownstone, with a radiator that knocked and a window full of Manhattan.

He made up the bed with sheets still creased from the package. Then he took the couch.

"Office rules," he said. "Somebody stays."

"Is that a real rule?"

"It is now."

In the morning I called Delfina from his phone and told her where my father hid the good sausage.

At noon she left a shopping bag at the coffee shop on the corner.

I didn't give her the address. She didn't ask.

Inside the bag were my laptop and a foil package labeled CUTLETS in my father's handwriting.

Inside the foil was the black drive.

Aaron watched me unwrap it on the kitchen table.

"Your father kept your secrets in his freezer."

"My father kept everything in his freezer. We found his will next to the peas."

I opened the laptop. I opened the drive.

I scrolled to one month, September.

One page.

Then I turned the screen toward him.

"Names are hidden," I said. "Amounts and dates aren't."

He leaned in.

I watched him read.

Every dollar that crossed from the dirty side to the clean side that month passed through the same single door.

His finger stopped.

"Oh," he said quietly. "Oh, that's beautiful."

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