I got used to Cinder Way faster than I thought I would.
Cass left before sunrise and came home after midnight. Some nights he came home with a different jacket than the one he'd left in. He never explained. He always brought food.
A foil-wrapped breakfast burrito from the bodega on Dot Ave. A cold meatball sub. Once, a whole rotisserie chicken from Stop & Shop, still in its plastic dome and still warm at the bottom.
He set the dome on the card table, tore the leg off bare-handed, and held it out to me.
I took it. Then I tore it in half along the joint and held the bigger half back out to him.
He looked at the chicken. He looked at me. He didn't say anything. He took it.
After that he didn't ask if I wanted any when he brought food. He just split it.
I used the wire from the necklace to buy a real mattress, a comforter that didn't smell like anyone, an LED lantern, and a Mr. Coffee. I called the gas company and got the power back on under a name that wasn't mine. I picked up an overnight shift at a Cumberland Farms two blocks away — eleven to seven, low foot traffic, no questions about the suitcase girl who'd appeared in Lower Mills.
It was the first time in my life nobody had told me what my schedule was.
The TV behind the Cumby's counter kept the news on with the sound off. Boston 25, NECN, sometimes WCVB. The third night, Annie was on it.
She was at a Bruins charity event. She was wearing a pearl set I'd inherited from Margot's mother. She was telling a reporter, with Bash Sheffield's hand at the small of her back, you know, I was raised by a nice family in upstate New York, and I think it taught me to appreciate every blessing — some people are born on third base and forget they didn't hit a triple.
Bash smiled at her like she was the sun.
The chyron at the bottom said: Sources close to Sheffield Industries say a winter engagement is "a matter of time."
Everyone had forgotten that the girl Bash Sheffield had been engaged to was me. Wren Winthrop.
No. Wren Locke now.
The Cumby's TV cycled to the next story before I felt anything about it.
A few days later they cut to my own life again. The Winthrop Foundation Spring Benefit, Bates Hall, "welcome home Annaliese," black tie, the Globe and Boston Magazine and the Names column already filing pre-coverage. Annie laughing at the head of the room. Margot looking at her like a bird who has remembered, very late, where she put her egg.
That hall had been booked two years ago for my twenty-first. The save-the-date was sitting in a thousand Beacon Hill drawers with my name still on the inner card. They had not canceled it. They had transferred it. Same caterer. Same string quartet. Different daughter.
I clicked the TV off. The next customer wanted a scratcher and a pack of Newports.
The press is sharper than a knife, I told myself. Wait.
That night Cass came home wrong.
He walked through the door, made it three steps, and went down on one knee on the kitchen linoleum. His hand was pressed against his stomach and his hand was full.
I knocked the chair over getting to him.
"Cass — Cass — "
He pushed me off with his other arm and dragged himself up against the wall. He was breathing through his teeth. He took something out of the inside pocket of his jacket, smearing it as he did, and held it out to me.
It was an envelope. Cream stock. Engraved gold. The Winthrop Foundation crest.
The corner of it was wet through with him.
"You want to go?"
I looked at his face — the gray under his cheekbones, the way his mouth was trying to hold itself in shape — and I started crying. I hadn't cried that morning in the foyer. I cried now.
"You did this for paper?"
He tried to lift his hand to my face and the wound in his side caught him hard enough that he made a sound I'd never heard a man make.
"Scratch."
"Cass — "
"My people," he said, very evenly, looking at me, "don't get hurt."
I cried harder. I looked down at the envelope. The lettering was beautiful. I had picked the engraver myself, two summers ago, for what I'd thought was going to be my own gala.
I wiped my face with my sleeve.
"Take me there."
"Done."
He smiled the way he had in the doorway on the first night. Candle behind him this time, flickering on a wall I'd watched him drag himself up.
I wore the Carolina Herrera.
White silk, ankle-length, A-line. Teddy had handed me the box on my sixteenth birthday at the Greenwich house and said, for your debut, kid. I had worn it once, to the Cotillion Club intro, with my hair in pearls and my mouth half-numb on champagne. It had hung in a bag in the back of my closet ever since. It was one of three pieces I'd brought to Cinder Way. I hadn't known until that morning whether I was going to put it on or burn it.
I did my own makeup at the card table by lantern light. Eyes darker than the Junior League had ever seen on me. Concealer over four nights of bad sleep. Lipstick the wrong color for the Foundation crowd, which is to say, the right one.
Cass left in the afternoon. He said he had to get ready. He came back at dusk in a black two-button suit that fit him better than anything he owned at Cinder Way had any right to. The cut at his hairline had a butterfly bandage on it. A clean shirt. No tie. He hadn't shaved. He looked exactly like the kind of man a Beacon Hill matron would describe as unsuitable, dear, do not engage.
In his right hand, low against his thigh, was a long bundle wrapped in black canvas. The end of the canvas was wet. One drop, then another, hit the floorboards as he stood in the doorway.
He held out his other hand to me. Palm up.
I put my hand in his. His was cold. It was very steady.
"Let's go."
We didn't take a car. We walked. From Cinder Way through Lower Mills to the Red Line, and from the Red Line up to Park Street, and from Park Street across the Common in the dark. From a poisoned-ground neighborhood the city had stopped pretending to remediate, to the part of the city the city writes its own brochures about. The whole way, neither of us spoke. The whole way, the canvas in his hand kept ticking down at the asphalt.
Bates Hall was lit up like a cathedral that knew it. Limos staged along Boylston. Caterers at the side door. The Names columnists hovering at the marble entrance with their little fold-out stools. Annie's "welcome home" at the Boston Public Library. Two thousand square feet of carved oak and Sargent murals turned over to the family that had decided I wasn't part of it anymore.
When Cass and I came up the front steps, the murmur on the steps stopped.
A bouncer in catering blacks stepped in front of us at the threshold.
"Private event. Invitation only."
I took the engraved card out of my clutch and handed it to him.
He saw the brown smear on the gold. He saw the cuff of Cass's jacket. He looked up at Cass's face and forgot what his next sentence was going to be.
He stepped aside.
Inside, Bates Hall was at full hum. Crystal coupes. A string quartet doing something graceful and forgettable. Teddy at the podium with his glass raised, mid-toast. Margot on his left in cream crepe and pearls. Annie on his right, head bent, smiling at the floor in the studied modesty of a girl who has been told all her life she would be modest someday.
"...and so tonight," Teddy was saying, "we welcome home a daughter we never stopped looking for — "
Cass took one step into the doorway and kicked the inner doors of Bates Hall off the latch.
The boom hit the marble of the room like a rifle in a chapel.
The string quartet died on the same beat.
Two thousand faces turned at once.
Cass and I stood under the carved arch of the doorway. Behind us, the entry hall. In front of us, the Foundation crowd of every name I had grown up obeying.
He flicked his wrist. The black canvas slithered off the blade and pooled at his feet.
The fixed-blade was scratched on the handle and wet to the hilt. The drop that fell off the tip onto the marble of Bates Hall was as red as anything in the room.
A woman somewhere in the back of the hall screamed.
Two of the Sheffield security men moved one step toward us, looked at Cass's face, looked at the knife, and stopped where they were.
Teddy went the color of a winter sky.
"Who the hell — Security! Security!"
The men he was yelling at were already not moving.
Cass didn't look at any of them. He turned his head a quarter turn toward me. His face did the small thing it did when he saw me, that crease at the corner of his mouth that wasn't quite a smile.
He spoke quietly. The hall was so quiet it carried.
"Sis. Which one of them did it."
Two thousand people heard him.
"Just point. I'll handle it."