At six, Gabriel calls. He tells me that a team of cops has already been through all the surveillance footage available. It’s a goose egg. Even though every building along Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues has security cameras, each one only films its own entryway. Anyone walking down the side streets goes undetected.

“The cameras don’t even pick up Lauren. Aside from when she leaves her building at around ten after one, she’s not seen again. And the worse news is that Richard Trofino never appears.”

“He could have left through another exit,” I say. “One without a camera.”

“I know,” he says, then sighs. “With that bit of positive news, I’m going to call it a day. Let’s meet first thing tomorrow and strategize for a bit about how to approach Trofino.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

I’ve now lived in New York City for nineteen years, the longest stretch I’ve spent in one place. For the first eighteen years of my life, I called suburban Virginia, right outside of DC, my home. It was a nice enough place to grow up, but boring as hell. For reasons that I still don’t understand, I chose to go to college and law school in similarly low-key environments, which meant that by the time I had my JD degree, I was more than ready for city life.

I started out in the East Village, because that was the place young professionals ended up. Back then, I called a run-down one-bedroom walk-up home. Two of us shared the bedroom, and a third paid a share of the rent to sleep on the pullout in the living room. After a few years, I wanted a place of my own but couldn’t cover the rent in Manhattan anywhere south of 110th Street. Commuting from Harlem or above didn’t make sense because I worked downtown, so I migrated to Brooklyn. First to Park Slope, and then, after Stuart and I married, we rented the garden floor of a townhouse in Carroll Gardens. Jacob’s arrival necessitated a second bedroom, and Brooklyn proved too up-and-coming for us to expand our living quarters and also pay for a regular babysitter, so we relocated to Queens—the “new Brooklyn” as it’s sometimes called in the press.

My neighborhood in Astoria is an eclectic mix of working-class families, land speculators, actor types—which is why it’s referred to as “Actoria”—and people like Stuart and me, priced out of a family home in Brooklyn or Manhattan. The broker described the place in the real-estate listing as a “jewel box,” which really just means that it’s small.