Chapter 5: Dumplings

Lena did not go back to Queens that night.

She went to the bindery on West Eighty-Fourth Street, where she had a key.

There was a cot in the supply room, and nobody there knew Damian Karras.

The shop smelled of paste, leather and old paper.

She turned on one lamp over the workbench and sat down under it.

She had Cassandra's cream card in front of her, and a book she had no hope of fixing tonight.

Her phone buzzed at seven.

Phoebe: I'm outside. I have dumplings. Let me in or I'll cry in the street.

Lena stood for a long time with her thumb over the screen.

Somebody who was in that courthouse.

It could have been anyone.

It could have been her mother, or her father, or the clerk, or the man who sold them flowers.

Phoebe was the one who had come to the study and told Damian to file it.

Phoebe had been crying.

Lena unlocked the door.

Phoebe stood on the step in her puffer coat with a paper bag in each arm.

Her mascara was still smeared from the day before.

"I got pork and the vegetable ones and the weird shrimp ones you like," she said.

"And two kinds of sauce, because I couldn't decide. And a bubble tea I've already drunk half of."

She shrugged helplessly.

"Sorry. I was anxious."

Lena laughed.

It surprised her.

"Come in."

They ate on the floor of the supply room with the bag spread out between them.

Phoebe told how she had run two red lights getting here.

A man on a scooter had called her a name so creative she was thinking of using it.

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