“Here you go, little sister. A reminder. Can’t read? It says ‘four,’” he said; “four,” a near-homophone for “death.” “I give you four weeks, then we talk again.”

Four weeks was nothing. She wouldn’t rob anyone—not for him, not for this.

He wiped his blade clean against the shoulder of her tunic. “Why so sad? A pretty face has no trouble making money here.”

Her cheeks flushed an angry red. She didn’t trust herself to speak, and instead preoccupied herself with fishing out her handkerchief, using it to bind her palm, holding the edge in her teeth to pull the knot tight.

By the time she glanced up, Lai Hock was gone.

The inside of Gean Choo’s lodging house offered a hot, foetid darkness, redolent with mingled odours of urine, garlic, and belacan. The light from the outside fell in narrow slices through the bars of the door, turning her shadow into a looming monstrosity.

She navigated the creaking steps to the first floor, where the landlady’s daughter stopped her in the corridor. “Shopping?” Bee Leng asked in Hokkien, glancing down at the cloth bag hanging from Gean Choo’s shoulder, her lipstick bright red around a mouthful of gum. “You can afford new things, but not rent?”

They said Bee Leng’s mother had run off with a Malay, evidence of her mixed parentage in the shape of her eyes, the shade of her skin, which was darker than her mother’s warm beige. They said her father had left them before she’d been born.

People said a lot of things.

Gean Choo reached into her sleeve pocket and pulled out her few remaining coins, offering them with both palms out, her bandaged left hand below the right. “I can pay this much today. I’ll come back with the rest next month.”

“Huh.” Bee Leng took the coins. “It’s not much.”

Gean Choo was tired of being nice, but she tamped down her instinct to snap. She folded her anger into neat triangles and stashed it away somewhere in a forgotten pit, never to be recovered. “I know. I’m sorry.”

The corridor was narrow, the walls serving as storage, leaning in on either side with stacked firewood, sleeping pallets, clothes, cooking utensils, and baskets, all crowding in upon the walkway. A cockroach scuttled from the base of one wall to the other, followed by its friend, both unafraid to be seen in the open. Gean Choo couldn’t reach the rest of her things until Bee Leng moved—which Bee Leng knew. Yet she stood there, jaw moving mechanically, the gum occasionally making rhythmic sounds as it pulled against the wet insides of her mouth.

“Please,” Gean Choo said. “I’ll be late.”

“Late for what?”

The other women hadn’t told her, but they’d told Lai Hock. “I’m taking a job. Moving out.”

“What job?”

“The Edevane house.”