The message came in at 9:41, and Emma let it sit for eleven minutes.
She was on the fire escape outside the kitchen window, wrapped in a blanket, her back against the brick and her feet pushed through the rusted bars. The dead basil in its coffee can had gone gray and crisp. Below her the laundromat's yellow light spilled onto the alley, and a man in a hooded sweatshirt folded sheets with the slow precision of someone who had nowhere else to be.
I have to tell you something else. Not about Lowell. About my father.
She'd opened it at once. That was the stupid part. She'd told him to get out, she'd meant it with every muscle she had, and then her phone had lit up and her thumb had moved before her brain could vote. Read. She'd watched the word appear on his side, the way you watch a door
