In Disguise: A Fortune, A Lie, A Neighbor.

Chapter 1 (Moving Day).

I found the apartment on a Tuesday and moved in on a Saturday. That's how fast everything happens when you're nineteen and desperate to get out of your parents' house in Worcester. My mother cried loading the last box into my uncle's borrowed pickup. My father just stood on the porch, arms crossed, telling me to keep my door locked, and my location shared with my sister. I told him I would. I didn't, not really.

The building was a three-story walk-up on Pratt Street in Allston, the kind with a fire escape bolted crookedly to the brick, and a homeowner, Mr. Kowalczyk, who ran a dry cleaning business two blocks over. Within a week I'd signed something I barely understood in a manila folder at his counter.

Unit 2B. Four hundred square feet if the listing was being generous, with a radiator that clanked and a window overlooking a yard where somebody's grill sat under a blue tarp year round. It was mine, though. That was the part that mattered. My name is Mara Delgado, starting my sophomore year at Boston University, switching from the dorms to my first real apartment, my first real lease.

Moving day was chaos, too many boxes, a stairwell that seemed designed to make furniture carrying miserable. My cousin Danny bailed at the last minute, which left me and my mother hauling boxes up two flights while my father grumbled about how nobody builds elevators anymore.

I was standing in the stairwell with a box of books cutting into my arms when the door to 2A opened across the hall.

"You need a hand with that?"

The man standing there looked maybe thirty, in a paint-stained hoodie and jeans with a hole starting at the knee, the kind that comes from actual wear, not a*****e tag. He had a duffel bag over one shoulder and a beat-up guitar case in the other hand, moving in himself, apparently, on the exact same day, into the unit across from mine.

"I'm okay," I said, which was a lie. The box was two seconds from slipping out of my arms.

He caught it anyway, just steadying the bottom corner until I got a better grip. "Manuel," he said. "Looks like we're neighbors."

"Mara." I shifted the box against my hip. "Are you just moving in too?"

"Today's the day." He nodded toward his own door, propped open with a folded phone book, revealing a mattress on the floor, a single lamp, a few boxes. "Not much to unpack. I travel light."

My mother appeared behind me, breathing hard, and gave Manuel the once over mothers give strange men in stairwells. "Nice of you to help," she said, in a tone that meant I'm watching you.

"Just being neighborly," Manuel said, smiling in a way that seemed to disarm her slightly. Though she'd bring him up twice more before she left that evening.

That was it, that first day. A name, a held door, the kind of small kindness you forget by dinnertime. I unpacked until nearly midnight. I didn't think about Manuel again until Tuesday, when I found a folded twenty dollar bill taped to my door with a note in neat handwriting: for the pizza place on Brighton Ave, it's better than the one you ordered from. He'd apparently seen my delivery bag and had opinions about it.

I didn't take the money. I left it back on his doormat with a note of my own: thanks, but I can find my own pizza, promise. I did, admittedly, walk down to that pizza place that weekend, just to see. It was better. I never told him that.

Our building had six units, two on each floor. Downstairs lived Mrs. Alvarez, a retired nurse who knew everyone's schedule better than they knew it themselves. The third floor belonged to a couple who worked nights and were rarely seen. And then there was us, 2A and 2B, facing each other across four feet of hallway carpet.

I called my mother that Sunday, sitting cross-legged on my bare mattress, and told her the neighbors seemed fine, that the guy across the hall had helped carry a box.

"Manuel," I said when she asked his name. "Thirty-ish, maybe. He said he's between jobs right now."

"Between jobs," she repeated, in a tone that carried a whole paragraph of unspoken opinion. "Just be careful, mija. New city, new apartment, strange men helping with boxes."

"I will, Ma."

"You always say that."

"Because I always mean it," I told her. True, as far as it went, though I'd learn over the following months that meaning to be careful and knowing what to be careful of were two very different things.

I hung up and looked around my half unpacked apartment, boxes stacked three deep, a single lamp throwing long shadows across the bare floor, and felt, for the first time since signing the lease, a small flicker of fear underneath all the excitement. Not fear of Manuel specifically. Just the ordinary fear of being on my own, in a city that didn't know my name yet.

I didn't think anything of Manuel those first few weeks, beyond finding him a little strange, a little too attentive for someone I'd known four days. He seemed like someone getting by, always in worn clothes, mentioning he was between jobs, fixing the building's leaky bathroom faucet himself because he couldn't afford to wait for the homeowner. I didn't know yet that none of it fit Manuel at all. I didn't know yet that the guitar case in his hand that first day held an instrument he'd bought secondhand specifically because it looked worn, or that the hole in his jeans had been there when he bought them at a thrift store the week before, because he'd wanted, for reasons I couldn't have guessed, to look exactly like what I assumed he was.