“You’re an addict. You’re fired. Get your final pay from Isabel in the office, get out and get your shit together, Lucy, because if you don’t, you’re gonna die.”

Diego’s words held Lucy hostage for a stunned moment. Defeated, she untied her apron and walked past him to the office. The door was open and Isabel let on like she hadn’t overheard. She was at her desk talking on the phone. Lucy set her apron and order pad down on the desk. Glancing at Lucy, Isabel, still on the phone, used one hand to yank open a low desk drawer, pluck out an envelope and hand it to her before suddenly turning her back to stand at the file cabinet in the corner, phone to her ear.

“We have the inspector’s report, Gavin.” Isabel pulled open a top file drawer and searched folders. “I have it. I can get it to you.”

Turning to leave, Lucy saw in the still-open desk drawer, the blue canvas money bag holding the week’s uncounted cash tips to be distributed. It was unlocked, open and bulging with bills.

As Isabel snapped through the files, she said: “By the way, Gavin, we’re looking for a server, so if you know anyone.”

Lucy seized as much cash as she could, zipped the bag, closed the drawer and left.

A half hour later, Lucy was on a subway train staring at her reflection in the window as the cars rumbled and swayed uptown from Lower Manhattan.

Fired from yet another job, Diego’s words cut through her.

I’m dying.

At her first stop waiting on the platform for her connecting train, she gazed into the stinking, black abyss of the tunnel as if it were her past, her present and her future.

I’m thirty-three and for as long as I can remember I’ve been spiraling down, down, down and it is all because I was betrayed.

Boarding her connecting train, she found herself again in the window, her car rocking, the shrill metallic scraping of the steel wheels rising like a scream as something cold passed through her.

She yawned. The craving was coming.

Hang on.

She surfaced at her stop in the South Bronx.

In the five-block walk to where she lived, Lucy counted ten rats scuttling in the open, ravaging the trash on the broken sidewalks, darting among discarded appliances in vacant lots. Her apartment was in a decaying low-rent complex.

She walked up the stairs to her seventh-floor unit because the elevator was a death trap. Paint blistered on the graffiti-laced walls, plaster had fallen away in patches and the smell of urine permeated the corners. It was common to see rats and stray cats in the halls. The noise was constant, throbbing music, shouting, the hiss and rush of water through pipes that leaked. Roaches, stains, cracks and mold everywhere.