The memory didn't come back all at once. It leaked into the present like water through a cracked ceiling,cold, persistent, and smelling of damp plaster.
Before the glass towers, before the private jets, and before the name Sterling was a brand of global power, it was just a word on a lease we couldn't always pay.
Brooklyn in the mid-aughts wasn't the curated playground of hipsters it is today. It was a place of iron and rust, of shadows that stayed long even at noon. We lived in a three-story walk-up on a street where the streetlights were usually shattered within an hour of being replaced.
I was sixteen, my blazer from the public high school already two sizes too small, the sleeves riding up my wrists as I climbed the warped wooden stairs.
"It’s not even a debate, Derrick," I said, le
