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It comes out steadier than I feel.

Just me. The way it’s always been.

Except that’s not true anymore.

Now it’s me plus one. And the one is the size of a fig, and its father is the most dangerous man in New York.

That night, I sit on the pullout bed in my studio in Astoria. The only window looks at the brick wall of the building next door, three feet away.

It isn’t much. It’s mine.

And for the first time, I let myself think it.

I could tell him.

I could find him. It wouldn’t be hard. Knock on whatever enormous door he lives behind and tell him our one night wasn’t a one-night thing.

It was a rest-of-your-life thing.

Maybe he’d help. Rent. Doctors. Diapers. Maybe it could work.

Then I remember the voice outside that door. Calm. Almost bored. Ordering a man’s fingers broken before breakfast.

I heard what that voice does to men who get too close to what he thinks is his.

What does a man like Enzo Accardi do when he finds out about a baby he never asked for?

Does he hire lawyers?

Does he take it?

Or does he decide the easiest problem to solve is the woman carrying it?

I can’t trust him to do the right thing.

I can’t even trust him not to make me disappear.

So I make a different choice.

I put my hand on my stomach. It still feels flat. It still feels impossible.

“Just us,” I whisper. “You and me.”

And then I make the only promise I know how to keep.

“We’re going to disappear. And we’re going to do it so well, he’ll never know we were here at all.”

So I make myself one more rule. I don’t search his name. I don’t look at pictures. I change the channel when the news says Accardi, and I look at my shoes when I pass a building that wears it. If I ever see his face, I’ll want him. And wanting a man like that is how girls like me end up in a river.

CHAPTER 5

STEVIE

Almost five years later…

“Mama, aren’t those the pinch-y shoes?”

I’m hopping across our Bushwick studio on one foot, one pinch-y shoe on and my blazer half buttoned, past the eviction notice taped to the inside of our door. Thirty days. I put it at kid height on purpose, upside down, so he’d think it was boring grown-up paper.