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else to say to her.
Just hurry. Tell my parents to hurry.
    She held Katherine's necklace in her hand, wrapping and unwrapping it around her wrist. The silver smelled like vinegar.
    Mallory wasn't sure what she was waiting for. Katherine to wake up and answer the phone. Her parents to come home and answer it. Someone. Anyone.
    Years later, Mallory would wonder if she'd ever stopped waiting, if she'd ever left that black chair, staring at Katherine's doorway, waiting for someone who would never come back.

PART II
    2002

1
    Talia Montrose was an hour away from a whole new life.
    She had twenty grand in a leather satchel in the trunk of her LeBaron, a receipt in her pocket for two hundred thirty thousand more, just deposited in a brand new BofA account.
    Her old checking account was closed, her meager savings liquidated. She'd quit her job at Pay-Rite, told her general manager, Caleb, to go fuck himself for once instead of the teenage cashiers.
    Talia had three sets of winter clothes, a photo album, a box of Tampax and a down ski jacket, all folded tightly into a single paisley suitcase.
    Her palm was still warm from the rich man's handshake—her fingers cramped from signing and initialing the contracts. She could still smell his cologne—alien and spicy, like a Middle Eastern drink. She could still see the cold eyes of the Mexican who stood behind him.
    After making sure she understood the deal, making sure she had signed in all the right places, the rich man had smiled, and given her the satchel, and said, “Off you go.”
    Too easy. She was still in shock.
    Eight A.M., Vincent would be waiting for her at the Pancake & Chicken House on Broadway. Vincent had a gun. He could protect her, and the cash. They would turn the LeBaron toward Tahoe, and they would never look back.
    So why was she going back to the house—the place she had been so anxious to be rid of?
    She turned on Poplar, drove through the neighborhood she knew too well—the grave-sized yards, the pastel siding, the aluminum-foiled windows and cement flower planters that looked like Easter baskets. Brand-new cars and satellite dishes marked the drug dealers' houses. Old Mr. Benjamin was out in his white tank top and his U.S. Navy cap, watering his grass.
    Wasn't a bad-looking neighborhood. People heard West Oakland on the news, they heard about the homicide rate and drugs and gangs, they thought about a war zone—fires in trash cans and burned-out buildings and evil-looking kids with machine guns.
    Truth was scarier than that. Truth was West Oakland looked like a normal place. Clean, tidy, most of the residents hardworking, decent people. You had to look close to spot the bullet holes in the doorjambs and the windowsills. You had to be unlucky, or just plain stupid, to catch a drive-by. And the kids—you couldn't tell the dangerous ones by looking at them. Talia knew that firsthand.
    She took a left on Jefferson, past the homes of childhood friends—more and more of them dead, the older she got. She passed places where she'd grown up, raised her children, met her men.
    Six houses down on the left, the great brown stumps that used to be her palm trees years ago rose up in the front yard like a leper's fingers. The house's siding, once bright yellow, had faded to the color of stained underwear, tattooed with rust from the years it had spent under a ton of Johnny Jay's ornate metalwork. The roof sagged. Half the windows were webbed with cracks.
    Place wasn't worth a quarter million, even if the rich man's bullshit was true about a redevelopment project. No, this wasn't going to be the next Emeryville. They weren't going to put up any fucking artist lofts here. He'd just paid her off, plain and simple—paid her to go away. And she'd jumped at the chance.
    She backed the car up the driveway, took her satchel out of the trunk. No way she was gonna leave that much money unattended.
    The autumn air felt like satin.
    A pumpkin was smashed on her porch. Somebody had