I didn't open Jordan's drive at the firm. I opened it at my kitchen table with the door bolted and the chain on and the curtains drawn, the laptop resting on a folded dish towel because it had begun to run hot the way machines do when you won't let them rest. I'd bought a prepaid phone at a bodega on Steinway, cash, no card scanned, and I kept it face-down beside the laptop the way a deposition lawyer keeps a backup recorder. The password was a date for a sister Jordan had never told me he had. It worked on the first try, which frightened me more than a failure would have.

The drive held one document. Forty-six names, arranged by the year each woman had left the firm, beginning in 1997 and ending three weeks ago. Beside each name, a date of departure and a single letter — S for settlement, N for NDA, R for relocation. The first name, top of the page, was Margaret Kerr — sealed — R. Diane's name. Diane's mother's name. The woman whose folder lived in the third drawer of a cabinet I'd have to sign to open.

I didn't write the pattern down. Writing it down would have turned a thing I'd seen into a thing they could find a copy of. So I sat with it in my head, which is a worse place to keep it, and I let it assemble itself there over a Wednesday night and a Thursday night and the long flat hours of a Saturday.

Twenty-two of the forty-six women were dead.

I learned this the slow way, the only safe way — obituaries that didn't name the firm, court dockets sealed but indexed, bar-association moves from one state to another that read, when you lined them up, less like careers and more like a woman being walked quietly out of a country. Three of the deaths were called accidents. The other nineteen were complications. Brief illness appeared six times. Sudden cardiac event appeared four. Not one of them had reached sixty. Three hadn't reached thirty-five.

I closed the laptop at four in the morning and opened it again eight minutes later, because the dark behind my eyes had begun to fill with the dates.

And the thing I am most ashamed of, the thing I would have denied under oath, is what my mind did between the closing of the laptop and the opening of it. It went to him.

Not to the dead women. To Lachlan Cross. To the heat of his hand passing a silver pen through a six-inch gap, to the half-second neither of us let go, to the low register his voice dropped into when he said don't dance as though it cost him something. I sat in a kitchen lit by a screen full of women the firm had buried, and I caught myself wanting a man I had every reason to count among the people who could bury me — and I understood, with a clarity that turned my stomach, that this was the exact wound my mother had spent my whole childhood trying to close. You won't be able to tell, mija. The ones who want to keep you and the ones who want to own you knock the same way. I had built a life on never letting a man's hand mean more than it should. And here was the hand, and here were the graves, and my body would not stop leaning toward the one when it should have been running from both.

The prepaid phone lit on the dish towel. L.C.

I shouldn't have given him the number. I'd told myself, when I bought the burner, that it was a clean line, a line no one owned. I'd given it to him on the second day anyway, in a hallway, telling myself it was for the case. The screen held two sentences.

You're awake. Don't read the whole list tonight. It doesn't get less true if you sleep first.

He knew what was on the drive. Of course he knew. The knowledge should have been one more reason to fear him, and instead it landed like a hand laid flat between my shoulder blades in a dark room — I'm here, you're not the only one who's counted them. I typed before the smarter part of me could vote.

You knew these women.

Some of them. The dots lived and died. I knew what the dates meant before I ever met you. Go to sleep, Ms. Reyes. The names will still need you in the morning. So will I.

I set the phone face-down so I couldn't answer it, because the answer rising in me had nothing to do with the case. That was the whole of the sickness — that a screen full of buried women could not outvote two sentences from him, that so will I had gone straight past every wall I'd ever built and warmed a place I'd kept cold on purpose since I was old enough to know better.

I opened the drawer where I keep the things I can't afford to leave in the light — my mother's last letter, the lease I won't break — and I put nothing into it, because there was nothing safe to write. I only sat with my hands flat on the table the way Jordan had laid his flat to still the shaking, and I waited for the wanting to pass like a fever. It didn't pass. It banked, the way the financial-district lights bank at night, refusing to go out because the building is afraid of the dark.

---

Simone Tanaka sat down across from me in the cafeteria on Monday with a tray she had no public reason to carry.

She hadn't eaten lunch with anyone in two years. She ate at her desk, door closed, the same brown paper bag refolded each day and reused. Today she carried a tray with two glasses of water and a bowl of the kitchen's tomato soup, and she set it down with the deliberate weight of a woman placing a thing she'd decided on hours ago.

"Reyes."

"Tanaka."

"Eat the soup. It isn't poisoned. It is, however, salty, and we're going to look like two associates discussing expert witnesses." She slid one water glass an inch toward me. "Which we are not. My apartment, Wednesday, eight. Bring nothing registered to your name. Not the firm phone. Not the laptop you've been running hot."

I ate the soup. It was very salty. "Why now."

She looked at me the way Diane had, and didn't, all at once. Diane had measured whether I'd survive the truth. Simone had already decided I would survive — she was measuring whether telling me would make her own survival harder.

"Because you're the third one he noticed this year," she said. "The other two are practicing in different cities now. I'd like a third option for the third person, in case I'm the one who has to leave."

"Tanaka." I kept my voice level. "The third one he noticed. Is that a warning about him, or about them."

She paused at the edge of standing, and for a moment something almost like sympathy crossed her face. "That's the question, isn't it," she said. "I've been at this firm eleven years, and I still can't tell you whether the man watching you is the one setting the trap or the one standing in front of it. I only know they both watch the same way. Wednesday. Eight." She stood, left the tray, left the untouched second glass between us like a marker on a courtroom floor, and walked out.

---

I went to my mother's on Saturday.

I'd promised to call her at noon and I hadn't, because call felt thin against the week I'd had, and because the prepaid phone in my bag had begun to feel like a thing I should keep moving and never leave still. So I took two trains to the small apartment in the Bronx where she lives among the few objects she has carried through every move of my life — the framed cross, the table where she set To Kill a Mockingbird down beside my eleventh-birthday cake, the mirror by the door she has hung in every apartment we've ever had, low enough that she could check the back of a uniform she'd been told to keep spotless.

She was at the stove when I came in, black-eyed peas going soft in a pot, the smell of it filling the rooms — the soup she'd cooked my whole life for grief she never named. She held my face in both hands and looked at me the way she looks, the way no clause has ever managed to look at me, and for one moment the whole exhausting machinery of the week fell away and I was only a tired woman in her mother's kitchen, wanting to be told what to do.

"You're carrying two men," she said, not as a question, reading me off my own face the way she'd read uniforms for stains. "I can see it. One of them you came here to stop thinking about." She turned back to the pot, stirred it once. "It won't work. That's not how the thinking goes. You don't stop it by leaving the room. You stop it by deciding what he is, and you can't decide yet, so it follows you onto the train." She set the spoon down. "You didn't taste your food again, either. Go wash. There's a thing on the mirror you should see. The super swears no one came up. I don't believe him — but I don't think it was the super, mija. The super doesn't know how old you were in that coat."

I went to the mirror by the door.

Tucked into the frame, at the corner, where my mother would see it every time she checked herself before a shift, was a photograph.

It was of me. I was eleven. I was standing on the sidewalk outside our building on Tremont, in the coat I'd worn two winters because we'd bought it big, looking up at something off the frame — and the photograph had been taken from above. From a window, or a roof. From the angle of someone who had been looking down at a child who didn't know to look up. I had no memory of the day. There was no reason on earth a stranger should have it.

I turned it over with my fingertips, the way I'd taught myself to turn things I couldn't afford my prints on.

On the back, in a hand I didn't know, three lines:

Your mother never lost sight of you. Someone else never lost sight of you either. Be careful which one you've started to trust. — Friend.

In the next room my mother stirred the pot, and the steam of the black-eyed peas drifted out to where I stood, and I held a photograph of a child I no longer remembered being, taken by a hand that had been watching her from above the whole time she thought no one was looking — and I could not, standing there, swear that the hand I'd started to trust was a different hand at all.