“There’s a HoJo on 85,” Jan says. “Your father and I spent a night there in the early days.”

Emily’s dad died seven years ago. It’s been a long, often dark, trip without him. Jan, she knows, loved him deeply.

“But you both had places in Samhattan,” she says.

“Hey,” Jan says.

Emily wants to smile. Normally, an innuendo like this would make her outright laugh. Mom and Dad stayed in a hotel when they didn’t need to. What for? Emily knows what for. She suddenly wonders if they’re heading to the very place she was conceived.

The highway’s in sight. The top of the trucks using the concrete overpass.

Ahead, a woman in what looks like a nightgown crosses the street at a slow walk. She’s barefoot. They may have turned off Fifth Street but there’s more to Samhattan’s underbelly than a few blocks.

Jan slows the car. Emily looks out the passenger window. In this concrete pocket by the highway, the warehouses are closed up for the night. Barred windows. Dented steel doors. Some streetlamps light up the cracked sidewalks, but there’s a lot of darkness.

The side street they drive on is slim, and the woman now in the middle of it takes up more room than she should.

Emily thinks of Kennedy Lichtenstein, the one time Kennedy got into a game, when Kit Lamb sent her a pass and that asshole stole the ball and went the other way with it. Emily wants to kill that girl right now. Wants to grab her by the sides of her head and—

“Move it,” Jan says. Probably loud enough for the woman to hear, as the windows are still down. But the woman doesn’t move it. She raises a hand and points at the car. “Oh, come on,” Jan says. “What is this?”

But Emily is focused on something else. The woman isn’t just pointing; her eyes are wide, her mouth open. She’s talking.

Emily turns around, looks out the Blazer’s back window. Hard to tell if anything’s back there.

“She’s probably high on PCP,” Jan says.

“I don’t think she is,” Emily says. She isn’t sure why she said this. But she doesn’t like the woman, the pointing.

Emily looks out the back window again.

Nobody here but them.

Jan honks.

“Come on!” she yells, this time for the woman to hear.

But the woman remains where she is. Pointing.

Emily leans her head out the window.

“Hey, don’t,” Jan says. “Woman like that could throw a needle at you.”

Again, Emily might’ve laughed at this on a different day. But she wants to hear what the woman says.

“What?’ Emily calls. “What’s wrong?”

“Emily…” Jan says.

She can’t hear the words. It’s a loud whisper at best. She pulls her head back into the car, looks out the back window.

“I can’t drive around her,” Jan says. She’s right. Either direction is too narrow.

She honks again. Holds it longer.

The sound of the horn coupled with the woman’s indistinct voice makes Emily feel sick inside. Whatever this is, it’s wrong. She remembers a time when she and her dad got stuck in an elevator in Chicago. The feeling that, had they just not taken that particular elevator, they could’ve avoided the harrowing forty minutes it took to fix it. The understanding of how one decision can walk you somewhere you don’t want to be and leave you there.