He buttoned up his shirt and handed me my own clothes, neatly folded. This guy was big on keeping things equal. If he was dressed, so was I. When I’d arrived at his hotel room, he’d introduced himself right away, like he didn’t give a damn about standard policy: “My name is Abraham Clay.”

“Matilda.”

My throat clamped shut when I said it. It belonged to my old life, this name. The sounds didn’t belong here. They struggled against the difference.

Now he handed me a cigarette. “I’m going to smoke,” he said. “And I’d like if you smoked, too.”

Wind lifted the hair on my arms. A siren hollered from far away, then closer, closer—wailing louder, faster, sharper—until the sounds got slower, faded, and the ambulance was gone. “I make those,” said Abraham. “My company does.”

“Sounds important,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s a living.”

He told me he was getting a divorce. Not in Reno but in Vegas, where he’d lived with his wife. They’d fallen apart after she aborted their first pregnancy. He was almost sixty, but he’d never had a child. “I should have stopped her from getting it,” he said. “It ruined us.”

I started to say something back—It’s okay or maybe It’s done now—but he cut me off. He told me I should get out of Reno.

He said it sharply, and quick like he was trying to forget what he’d said about himself. He didn’t know me, he said, but everyone deserved something better than what I had—didn’t they? Didn’t I think so?

What was I going to say with someone actually listening? It was like the sharp needle pains of hands coming back to life after the cold. If I focused on my thighs, I could make the muscles remember how he’d pushed them apart.

I slept in his bed. Every time the sound of a siren sailed through the night, I thought about the whole world he owned. I asked how many ambulances he’d made.

“How many wailers?” he said. “Probably thousands.”

It took me years to go looking for Fiona, even though I thought about her all the time, and Lovelock was only a couple hours’ bus ride from the depot in Reno. It was Abraham who finally convinced me to find her. I’d told him a little bit about my past, how Fiona was someone I still wondered about. “You should keep track of people who’ve been good to you,” he said. His own life had a lot of loose ends.

Lovelock was an ugly town with a jail to its name and not much else. The address took me to a trailer park at the edge. Fiona’s place was nailed to the ground with porches and rickety plastic stairs, great thick snakes of cables running into the hot, hot soil. There was a mat in front of the door that showed a kitten pawing at a couple of butterflies. It would never catch them. Everything was coated with dirt and sand.