Page 72 of Sweet Ruin

“It’s a little chaotic,” she says, “but from what I can tell, it looks like a woman exposed her husband and sister for cheating on her via PowerPoint. Ring any bells?”

I feel sick.

All of this happening to me is bad enough.

But all of it happening to me while a viral audience of unseen millions watches along?

That’s much, much worse.

“I gotta go,” I blurt. “Thank you. I’ll call about the divorce.”

I turn tail and flee. I avoid the hungry elevator and take the stairs down nine floors instead, my bag banging my hip on every landing.

Outside is miserable. Just truly awful stuff. Sleet, wet, cold, wind, angry pedestrians screaming at me for not lunging out of their way.

But I stand there anyway. I’m lost. I’m getting crushed like those elevator doors wanted to do to me. Squeezed between too broke to stop it and too thick to be loved.

There has to be a way out.

And there is. I already know it. If I’m being honest with myself, I knew I’d end up going that way before I even stepped foot in Skye Brewer’s office.

I need time.

I need money.

I have neither.

But I know one person who has both.

14

KANE

The map is four feet by six feet and takes up the whole dining table.

I had it printed a decade ago from a survey plat, then had it laminated so I could mark it up and wipe it clean as things progressed. It depicts every parcel between Thirty-Ninth and Forty-Fifth, from Third Avenue down to the water, along with lot lines, lot numbers, and square footage.

All told, it’s ninety-one parcels.

Ninety of them are shaded in.

I prefer to do the shading myself. Green marker, corner to corner, the day the deed transfers and not one fucking millisecond before. It’s a stupid little ritual and I’ve never explained it to anybody, including my brother, who is standing across the table from me right now with a plate of cold chicken in one hand, eating over the map like an animal.

“You’re getting grease on Forty-First Street,” I tell him.

“Eh, don’t get your panties in a twist. Forty-First Street is already yours.” Niko licks his thumb. “It can handle a little smudge.”

We’re at my brownstone on the Upper West Side. It’s the 28th of December, four in the afternoon, and the weather outside is absolute shit. My mother would have called it a good day to stay in and cook. To be fair, she said that about most days.

I’ve had the map out for two hours. I keep looking at the same place.

It lies dead center, one parcel from the corner of Forty-Fourth and Fourth. Lot 22. Twenty-four hundred square feet of building on a thirty-one-hundred-square-foot lot, two stories, brick.

White.

Unshaded.

An ugly gap in what should otherwise be a sea of perfectly shaded green.