“Why can’t you believe? You hardly know me. What does it matter to you who I am or what I do?”

I had the feeling that this was some kind of test, that even as her tone grew angry, she wanted me to do something, step between her and whatever was going to happen with that man. She raked the tarot cards into a pile, but she was having trouble with the drawstring of the silk pouch—her hands had started to shake.

“You don’t want to do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Whatever you are about to do. With him.”

“Just go, okay?” Nearly a whisper.

“Fine, do whatever you want.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and made my way to the door.

“Hey Lily,” she said, her voice stronger now. “Catch.”

It was in my hands before I made sense of the shape—my bracelet. The pearls still held the warmth of Clara’s skin. As I stepped out of the shop I shivered to think of that man waiting for her, what he might be asking her for, what she might give. He must have been at least forty-five. She certainly wasn’t eighteen. That pink, cooked-looking skin. The smell of his sweat. The drum of his stomach. That twitch in Clara’s hands. I wanted to scream. Scream for help, for her, for me. For everyone I had met since I came home: Beautiful, brilliant Emily stuck behind that desk. Carrie and the bile on her breath. Luis, whose personality was buried deep within his layers of silence. My mother, who had signed that paper in the hospital, saying yes to an impossible question. My father, and this city’s short memory: another stupid parking garage now stood in the same place where the first one collapsed. And because right then, probably, Matthew was watching the sunset slide behind the Manhattan skyline or in the back of a cab on the way to a fabulous restaurant, and everything I had worked for had dissolved in a single night.

Across the boardwalk, the roller coaster rumbled down its tracks and people cried out as they plunged toward the ground. Were we all like the people on the ride, even Clara, who claimed to be able to see? Whipped around helplessly, our fates playing out on a fixed course?

A man in tattered clothes approached me, shook a plastic cup that jingled with loose change. Every sound seemed too loud, garish. Everything was magnified, intense, too much of itself: The tinny noise of his coins bouncing together. The rank smell of his clothes. The squawk of the seagulls, the red of Clara’s awning that had at first looked tawdry and now simply looked sad. I moved past him, trying to escape the din.

“You stupid bitch!” he yelled. “Your hear me? Fuck you, you stupid bitch!”