I closed my eyes. “Okay.”

“If you could do anything with your life,” Abe said, “what would it be?”

“I’d like a little place of my own, I guess.” Which wasn’t even true. My favorite part of this new life was living with Abe.

“But what do you want to make from your life? That’s the question.”

“I don’t want to make it into anything. I just want to get through it.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I see.”

We talked about possible careers. He suggested professional housecleaning. He said I already had a résumé in this, from what I’d done in Nevada, and people would be impressed by a steady temp record at the bank. Maybe someday I could even run my own service. “Let’s work from there,” he said. “From an ideal outcome.”

How would I get there? Abe had it figured out. If I started with one client, just one, and did solid work, she’d recommend me. Before I knew it, voilà. It could start like that.

“A simple flowchart,” he said. “Make sense?”

The truth was, it was only showing me how another life could have gone, a life under my name, if I hadn’t been the one living it. But I told him, “Now I’ve got a sense of where to start.”

“Cheers to that,” he said, raising the empty carton of orange juice. He handed me the plans, neatly folded. He said I’d want to keep them somewhere safe.

I made breakfast for Stella on my first day of work. I would’ve liked to make some for Abe, just that once, but he left early, like he always did. I was ready to use the metal thermos he had given me. “You’ll want to bring your coffee from outside the office,” he said. “Trust me.” Stella gave me a sturdy pair of white sneakers for my daily commute and a little shoe bag to hold my pumps while I walked. I’d gotten a new set of blouses and pantsuits. Sherry, eggshell, celery, chartreuse. These were colors I’d learned from catalogs.

I screwed up the coffee and it tasted like sludge. Stella told me it was thick like pudding and good, which was nice of her to lie about.

I walked to the bank towers in my new white sneakers. There was a courtyard full of stone benches where I stopped to change into my heels. I knew I was working in the shorter building. Abe had given me a contact name, Sylvia Rodriguez, and a floor (thirty-eight), and nothing else.

Sylvia was a short, busty woman from Colombia. Her accent made her sound amused at every moment. She met me in the lobby and took me upstairs, swiping her card through a maze of turnstiles and locked doors along the way. We stopped at a huge sweep of cubicles glowing sickly under bright fluorescent lights.

“Welcome to North America,” she said. “This is your division.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sounds good.”