Chapter 1 - One Hour
The first thing I kicked was the cardboard box. The second was the last decent thing my brother had left me.
The box skidded off the Detroit apartment steps and burst open on the wet sidewalk. A framed photograph struck the curb. A man's folded sweater landed in the gutter. The woman standing in the doorway flinched but didn't cry.
“You have one hour,” I told her.
My name is Viktor Perrone. I was forty-eight, and I had spent enough years buying distressed buildings to recognize somebody trying to stay in one without permission. At least I thought I had.
Nora was thirty-five, wearing a plain black dress under a coat too thin for the November wind. Her dark-blonde hair had come loose against her cheek. She was standing in an apartment my younger brother, Paulie, had used before he died six weeks earlier.
I'd never seen her before that morning.
“Please,” she said. “Just let me take these.”
She knelt and began gathering photographs. The moving crew behind me waited beside a rented truck. Two neighbors watched from the first-floor window. Every pair of eyes made me feel more certain that I had to finish what I'd started.
“Paulie had no right to give you a place to live,” I said. “His permission died with him.”
Nora looked up. “That's not how a home works.”
“It's how this building works.”
My property manager had reported that a stranger was living in Unit 3B, a unit supposedly vacant for months. The bank wanted clean occupancy records before a refinancing deadline. I'd put off coming myself until that morning, when an investor threatened to walk away.
One box shouldn't have mattered. Neither should the photograph slipping from it: Paulie standing beside this woman under a courthouse awning, looking healthier and happier than I'd seen him in years.
Then something small rolled out of the box. Silver tapped concrete, turned twice, and stopped against my shoe.
I knew that ring.
Its broad band was scratched beside the engraving: V.P.
I picked it up, and my breath caught. My father had given it to me on my eighteenth birthday. I had given it to Paulie years later, on the last good night we'd ever had together.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
Nora rose slowly. Her hands were shaking, but she looked straight at me.
“He told me you'd come.”
The moving men shifted uneasily. I squeezed the ring until its edge pressed into my palm.
“Who told you?”
“Your brother.”
“Paulie couldn't have known I'd come today.”
“He didn't know when. He knew what you'd do.”
She reached into her coat, took out a folded piece of paper, then hesitated. It had been opened and closed so often that the creases were turning white.
“You can throw me out if you insist,” she said. “But you should know whose things you're throwing away.”
She handed me the photograph first. It wasn't a casual picture. On the back, in my brother's rushed handwriting, were four words: Our wedding. September 12.
I stared at it. Paulie had been married for almost two years. He hadn't called to tell me. I hadn't called to ask whether he was happy.
“You're his wife?”
“His widow.”
I looked at the sweater on the sidewalk. Paulie had worn it to dinner with me three Christmases ago. We had argued over money before dessert. After that, we'd communicated mostly through lawyers and curt emails about buildings our father had left us.
“Why didn't anyone tell me?”
“I tried,” Nora said. “Twice. Your office sent my letters back.”
A mover cleared his throat. “Mr. Perrone, should we keep loading?”
I turned to him. “Don't touch another thing.”
Nora didn't thank me. She moved past my shoulder to retrieve the photograph before a passing car splashed it. I followed, awkwardly carrying a ring I suddenly didn't deserve to hold.
Her folded paper was a marriage certificate. There were two signatures, a county seal, and a date that made my stomach twist: the same September weekend I'd told Paulie he was dead to me.
“I can have my attorney verify this,” I muttered.
“Do that. And tell him to verify the lease I sent your office, too.”
I looked up at her. “What lease?”
She searched my face for an answer I didn't have.
“Paulie said they would hide it,” she said. “He said they'd make you think I was a stranger so you'd do their work for them.”
“Who is they?”
Nora rubbed her hands as if they were cold. “The people selling you the story that this building is empty.”
Across the street, a dark sedan started its engine. I recognized the car belonging to Kent Barlow, the developer waiting to buy the whole Ash Street block. He had told me he wouldn't be coming to the property.
I started toward it. The sedan pulled away.
Nora caught my sleeve. “Viktor, listen to me. Paulie didn't fall because he was careless.”
My brother had died after a fall on the back stairwell of this building. The official report called it an accident. I'd signed the funeral paperwork and accepted that answer because it hurt less than asking why he'd been on those stairs alone.
“He knew the stairs were dangerous,” Nora said. “And before he died, he wrote down who'd been warned.”
I looked toward the narrow alley where my brother had taken his last steps.
May you like
Then Nora said something that made the ring feel like a weight around my entire hand.
“Your name is on that list.”
