Those days are long gone. I’ve since found the blues to fill the space in my soul, but I remember what it was like to sing up high like that. Reaching for the cracked paint in the ceiling, then past it, too. A gospel, a prayer. Never a celebration.

But it’s a nursery rhyme that was stuck in my head while that abandoned building in Detroit burned down, while a man who’d been stalking my mother for decades included me in his death wish. He’d become obsessed with her, blamed her for ruining his life.

Are all women destined to become their mothers? Even the ones who didn’t know their mothers past childhood? For Bonnie’s sake, I hope not. My mother lived on the outskirts of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon before she fled to Canada. My father was displaced in a whole other way. An indigenous child scooped up in the sixties, taken from his community and his culture just as sure as my mother left hers.

I have never had a home or good memory of family, other than a sister who doesn’t speak to me.

Poor Bonnie. She can do better, even if I can’t.

I’m sitting in the dark, feeling persecuted. If I hear Chopin again, I’ll smash something against a wall. I put on some Leon Bridges instead. He’s singing now about coming home. About wanting to be around. Hell, I want that, too. It’s not only the people who have sweethearts waiting for them at the door, holding an aperitif and wearing nothing but a silk robe, who deserve a peaceful homecoming of some sort. People like me, the ones with terrible luck, who don’t own a scrap of silk and make poor life decisions—we deserve some semblance of home, too. We may have nothing but horny dogs who wait for us to do their bidding, but our lives must mean something.

Maybe this is what I’m fighting to stay alive for.

In my imagination the city has turned against me, so I close Leo’s curtains and sit with my back against the wall. The neon lights still shine through. Whisper understands my mood. She comes over to me and forces her ears into my hands. I massage behind them until she falls asleep on my lap, her deep snores lulling me into a state of tranquility.

When I get to the office the next morning, I’m careful to linger outside for some time, to make sure no one is watching, then use the back entrance. Whisper goes ahead of me into the office Brazuca shares with Stevie Warsame.

Stevie isn’t there, but Brazuca is at his desk, staring into his computer screen.