Ava Walker entered her thoughts as well, even though Tonya tried her best not to consider her. The girl stormed into her consciousness often, usually due to a casual comment from Layla about who had secured what roles in the school’s latest play. Ava was four years her kid’s senior, so there wasn’t any real danger of them developing a friendship. Even so, Tonya had worried that their mutual interest in theater might shove her into Nate’s circle.

She recalled the last time she’d seen him at the school. She’d been sitting stiffly on a bottom bleacher, bracing for Nate’s oblivious wife to cease chatting with her hangers-on and meander over with an introduction—or an accusation. Tonya had mentally prepared to either force a smile and point out Layla or claim with all the faux sincerity she could muster that she had absolutely no idea what Melissa was talking about. Pulling off the conversation would have required an Oscar-worthy performance, Tonya knew. Fortunately, Melissa had never stopped socializing with her admirers, leaving Tonya to keep watching her from afar, preparing for the worst.

Nate’s death meant never again fretting about such a terrifying screen test. She wouldn’t need to steel herself every time she walked into the school for a flash of dark pewter hair and graying five-o’clock shadow. She wouldn’t have to worry that Nate’s deep-set eyes were fixed on her or that he needed to revisit their agreement. Most of all, Tonya could stop agonizing that he’d one day blab everything to his wife, twisting their history to cast her as the seductress.

*  *  *

The train recording robotically announced Tonya’s stop. She found herself breathing easier as she exited into the dim late afternoon. Brooklyn was different from Midtown Manhattan. Folks walked to and from grocery stores and corner bodegas. They let their bundled kids scooter down wide-open sidewalks. Some went to friends’ apartments for secret, unmasked social hours.

Tonya felt some of her earlier giddiness return as she hurried to her third-floor walk-up. Her apartment wasn’t big, but it was pretty with two bedrooms and one bathroom crammed into a well-decorated eight hundred square feet. The largest room was a long, rectangular living area featuring an exposed brick wall and unusable fireplace that she and Layla had filled with electric candles. They’d painted the drywall a grayish beige, selected a few low-profile furniture pieces, and mounted framed art everywhere, all of it created by Layla or Tonya herself. Her favorites were an abstract watercolor that Layla had somehow made at the tender age of four and an image of Layla’s and Tonya’s profiles as mother and baby, which Tonya had drawn using a mirror and a single, unending line.

Tonya unlocked the main door and then started up the stairs. As she climbed, a voice called out behind her. “Miss Sayre, is that you?”