There were more people in the subway car, but that didn’t make Tonya feel safer. Though many of the passengers wore masks and sat well away from one another, no doubt hoping to make it to work or home without being breathed on, there were plenty of barefaced holdouts with their chins jutted forward, daring anyone to suggest that they cover their mouth and nose. These maskless men and women reminded Tonya of drunks who’d strut around bars with their arms puffed out, commanding more space than they should have felt entitled to, itching for some passerby to unintentionally bump a shoulder. It was best to sit far more than six feet away from them.

Tonya found a corner seat and directed her attention to her phone, trying not to make any confrontational eye contact. She’d taught Layla to ape the same behavior. Her daughter was eleven, old enough to take the subway one stop from St. Catherine’s private school to their Carroll Gardens apartment—and smart enough to keep her head down around anyone with an off demeanor. Still, it hurt Tonya to think of her kid sitting in a space that an ill person might have occupied moments before, risking a passerby coughing on her, or worse. Nightly, she prayed that the news reports were right about most kids being relatively immune.

Tonya thought about her daughter the entire thirty-five-minute ride. On some level, she supposed that Layla was always on her mind, her freckled face and strawberry-blond hair waiting behind Tonya’s eyelids. Certainly, earning money to support her kid was the only thing that kept her in freezing temperatures outside a makeshift igloo.

In spite of herself, Tonya also thought about Nate Walker. On her cell, she read the New York Post article, the one that all but declared that Nate hadn’t committed suicide, given that he was found with a gun “arranged” in his hand. Police were still looking for his wife, whom the paper pointedly noted was best known for a twelve-year-old part in which she’d played the unhinged, murderous paramour of a successful lawyer.

The police clearly hadn’t done much investigating if they liked the wife for the crime, Tonya thought. Plenty of people had to feel a bit better knowing Nate Walker was no longer in the world. She couldn’t be the only one.

In her twenties, Tonya might have been sufficiently naïve to consider herself special like that. But she’d grown up enough to know that she’d been a type: starry-eyed, sexy farm girl with a bit of talent and big-city ambitions. She could not have been the only neophyte whom Nate had cajoled with promises of movie appearances and then pressured into “performing.” There had to be others without a child to protect. Women who couldn’t be bought off.