Two buildings grew together, the stone seam between them barely visible in the knitted brick. The exterior walls above were decorated with greened copper fleur-de-lis motifs.

There, before her now, was the black cast-iron mailbox. Somehow she had walked past it three times already without seeing it. Its face was smooth from age, not from polish. The box was slick with rainwater, the slot barely discernible due to a quirk of shadow.

Odessa looked around, the mail slot’s discovery feeling like an illicit act. She withdrew the envelope from inside her jacket, pausing a moment to look at the addressee’s name in her handwriting. Mr. Hugo Blackwood. A few stray raindrops spattered the thick manila paper, streaking the ink. She quickly fed the letter inside the slot. The envelope disappeared without a sound.

She looked around again, feeling suspicious, even watched. This felt like a dead drop, something out of a spy novel. The narrow street was dark, a sheer cavern full of pouring rain falling past the windows in the former dry goods warehouses.

No one appeared, nothing happened.

She walked away, the fine hairs raised on the back of her neck. She came to a pub a few doors up on the opposite side of the street and collapsed her umbrella, ducking inside. She took a seat at a two-top near the window and ordered a latte. She watched the onyx slab, difficult to see from that angle, distorted through the slanting rain. A few people hurried past it under umbrellas or folded newspapers, but none stopped. The stone wedge appeared to be part of the façade of the conjoined buildings, with nothing behind it. No visible way to retrieve the letter.

None of this made sense.

She waited. The latte was good, its creamy warmth easing the chill of the rain and the circumstances, the caffeine settling nicely into her nervous system. As she sat there, she realized suddenly that she felt better. Or rather: She realized how shitty she had been feeling the past few days. Delivering the letter—hell, even just having committed her thoughts to paper, and sealing them inside an envelope of precise size and color, and then depositing it in an anonymous seam in an ancient street on an island city of one and a half million—had achieved what would otherwise have taken months or years of therapy.

Maybe, she thought, this was what Earl Solomon was suggesting. Maybe this was a thought experiment to get her through this ordeal. Maybe “Hugo Blackwood” was a state of mind.

By the time she arrived back at the subway station, the rain had abated. A train came right away, and she rode back home to New Jersey thinking about the things she used to think about. Getting groceries. Catching up on laundry. The little things. There was comfort in this.