I do five songs. Lava requires that four of them be covers selected from a list compiled by management. It’s heavy with female rockers—Heart, Joan Jett, Blondie. I’m allowed to perform one original number. I hadn’t written a song since sleepaway camp, but after Charlotte’s death I bought a used upright piano I found on Craigslist. For several weeks, I didn’t get up from the bench except to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. “Never Goodbye” was the first song I wrote, and it’s still the best. I suspect that most people listening to the lyrics think it’s about a man, which is fine by me.

It’s always a struggle for me to get through it, which is why I save it for my penultimate number. I’d prefer to close with it, but I know the club wouldn’t have it. The closing number has to be loud. Really loud. Tonight I belt out Blondie’s “Call Me.”

The final applause is the most enthusiastic I’ve received to date. I even hear some whistles and a guy yelling, “More . . . More.”

There isn’t a backstage at Lava. The performance space is a red lacquer platform at the end of a large room. You exit from the left and join the paying customers, all of whom stand—at least until they start dancing. The only seating is at the bar.

When I step off the stage, Karen immediately approaches. She kisses me on both cheeks and then embraces me tightly.

“Amazing as always, Cassidy,” she says with a wink.

Back when I was doing open-mic nights, she had no idea that Cassidy was a stage name. After I was promoted to a paying gig, I had to reveal my real name—and Social Security number—in order to get paid, but I swore Karen to secrecy and asked that she always call me Cassidy in public.

I never told her my backstory, but if she had any interest about the real me, a Google search would have revealed that Ella Broden is a former sex-crimes prosecutor with the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan and the daughter of the country’s most famous attorney. These days, that bio comes after the most noteworthy thing about me—I’m the older sister of Charlotte Broden, the grad student who was murdered six months ago. The cherry on top of my cyber footprint is the revelation that I’m a killer of sorts myself, on account of the fact that I stabbed Charlotte’s murderer to death.

“I’ve been talking to Jake about you,” Karen says.

Jake is the owner of the club. There’s talk that he’s backed by mob money, but I like to think that’s all it is—talk—rather than consider the possibility that I went from prosecuting criminals to working for them.

“Good things, I hope.”

“Only.”