AFTER HAULING THE BINS TO HER HOTEL ROOM, AVERY MADE A RUN to Starbucks. She was amazed by the quiet of the city. For a Saturday afternoon, the streets were empty. Traffic lights rotated through their timers, changing from green to yellow to red, sometimes without a single car passing through the intersection. This was, in fact, the first time Avery could remember being in Manhattan around the Fourth of July. Her childhood summers were spent in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. And her adult years had been spent at her family’s house in the Hamptons. Staying in the city for the Fourth was something that never occurred to her. It was simply not something people did. Everyone she knew headed to the country or the beach. But now, as she walked the empty streets, she noticed an elegance to the city she had never appreciated before—as if the city were an antique chest that had been stripped of its peeling paint and coarse primer to reveal the true masterpiece underneath.

She relished the feeling that she had the city to herself, tons of work to do, and very little to distract her. At least, she tried to convince herself as much. As she walked the vacant sidewalks, her thoughts drifted back to Walt Jenkins and the foreign sense of excitement she felt about seeing him later today. With so much to do, she couldn’t afford these tangential thoughts to distract or confuse her. But the more she analyzed these feelings of excitement, the more Avery realized they were her mind’s attempt to shift her focus to something exponentially more thrilling than what waited for her on the other side of the weekend. Her attraction to Walt Jenkins had distracted her, if just momentarily, from the percolating anxiety about heading back to Brooklyn next week to see if Mr. André—she didn’t even know his last name—had come through with the falsified passport. If he did, Avery knew the real—and dangerous—work would then begin. As she entered the Starbucks, she realized that even in a near empty city she could find clutter and garbage. She was a Montgomery, after all.

Twenty minutes later she sipped a venti dark roast—two creams, two sugars—while she sat at the small desk in the corner of her hotel room. The dusty bins Emma had pulled from her attic were now empty, the contents spewed across the room covering the bed, coffee table, and floor. Pictures and yearbooks, photo albums and diaries. Avery had spent some time browsing through the pages of Victoria’s childhood diary and reading the hopes and dreams of an adolescent girl. The entries were sweet and charming, and covered the crushes Victoria had on grade-school boys, teachers she hated, and her dreams of writing novels when she grew up. Avery felt guilty for reading the private thoughts of a teenaged girl and after a while put the journal aside.