She wished her brother would come back from Mexico. When she’d visited him there the previous spring, she had insisted they visit a market she’d read about online, one that sold packets of ground-up bone wrapped in animal skin and statues of Jesus weeping blood and live birds and rabbits and snakes jammed into too-small cages. Philip hadn’t wanted to go—he’d seen enough fucked-up things without having to seek them out, he said, and Cassie had, too, though not in Mexico—but once they were there, he gamely translated for her as she bargained. She was traditionally terrible at these kinds of negotiations, acquiescing to any market person willing to stand firm on a price for more than a few seconds. But her brother had developed some skill in his time here, it seemed, a toughness that came in handy now as she tried to secure a tiny metal sculpture of a flaming heart. She had no sense of its economic value, and it wasn’t particularly beautiful. It had probably been produced in a factory. But she seized on the idea—and maybe it was subconscious and imposed retroactively—that it was important to concentrate her affection on one object in this overheated metropolis of things, even if it was arbitrary. Not caring overly much for the item she chose could be a statement that it was her attention itself that mattered, not what she chose to focus it on. Her brother got the heart down to what he deemed an appropriate price, with Cassie shaking her head along with his cues, even as her broad smiling throughout the interaction surely undercut him. Once they’d agreed, she sifted through the coins she’d pulled out of her pocket, attempting, with effort, to identify and add up the ones she needed. The woman in the stall seemed satisfied with the arrangement—she was offering to wrap her trinket in paper, place it in a dusty black plastic bag. “No es necesito,” Cassie said, confident she was being understood. She would keep it somewhere on her person, loose. She’d chosen something small enough for that.