THE LAST BLOCK BEFORE HOME

The man beside the car waited with his hand on the open door. I waited with mine inside my purse, wrapped around a can of pepper spray that had expired last spring.

“My employment situation?” I repeated.

“Yes, Miss Ki.”

“Then he can call me.”

“He would prefer to speak privately.”

“So would every landlord who wants to keep a security deposit.” I took out the cream card. “I'm not getting into a stranger's car. Tell Mr. Richi that if he has something to say, the all-night coffee shop on Franklin has windows, witnesses, and excellent terrible pie.”

The guard looked genuinely baffled. I understood. Men like him probably didn't encounter many invitations to sit under fluorescent lighting with a waitress who had forty-three dollars in her checking account. Finally he touched an earpiece and spoke too softly for me to hear.

“Twenty minutes,” he said.

“Tell him I'm not waiting twenty minutes. If he gets there, he gets there.”

I turned toward the coffee shop before my courage could evaporate. The car didn't follow. I counted that as progress.

Inside, I chose a booth facing the door, ordered the least expensive coffee, and called my friend Lena Ortiz. She worked the morning shift at a community kitchen and had once threatened to throw a broken toaster at a manager who withheld our tips. I told her the short version: I had lost my job, collided with a famous criminal, and had been invited into a car by one of his bodyguards.

“Please say you're not in the car,” she said.

“I'm with a witness named Doris who has worked this counter since before I was born.”

Doris lifted her coffee pot in acknowledgment.

“Send me your location anyway,” Lena said. “And don't accept a job with an employment contract that sounds like a ransom note.”

Dante arrived sixteen minutes later, without an entourage inside. He wore a dark coat over the same immaculate suit. Rain still clung to his hair. He looked at Doris, took in the windows and the two retired men reading the sports section, and sat opposite me without touching the coffee I had ordered for him.

“You didn't get in the car,” he said.

“You noticed.”

“I should have asked rather than sent someone.”

“Your employee took my keys last night after I said I didn't need help.”

Dante's expression changed. “He did what?”

“He opened my door before I agreed. The lock's been sticking for years. I'm apparently much less intimidating than a piece of hardware.”

“His name is Anton. He won't do it again.”

“You could start by telling him that my home is not part of your security perimeter.”

Dante set his hands on the table. They were big, scarred in places, and unusually still. “Agreed.”

I hadn't expected agreement. It gave me the unnerving feeling that our conversation was moving onto ground I didn't know how to navigate.

“How do you know I got fired?” I asked.

He slid a folded page toward me. It was a printout of my diner's employee schedule. My name had been crossed out in red ink. Beside it somebody had written, TERMINATE. DO NOT DISCUSS.

My stomach tightened. “Where did you get this?”

“I asked my office to check why someone approached you after last night's incident. One of our suppliers owns the diner's building. This arrived in the inquiry.”

“Which means you investigated me without asking.”

“Yes.” He held my gaze. “That was wrong. But somebody else investigated you first.”

He showed me the time stamp. The schedule had been altered at eleven forty-two last night. At eleven forty-two, I had been wrestling with my building's lock while Anton stood beside me. My manager hadn't even been on duty.

“Who sent the instruction?”

“The company that holds the restaurant lease. A firm called Arcway Civil.”

I knew the name. Arcway's banners hung over the construction site that had squeezed us into the narrow sidewalk where I'd fallen into Dante. The coincidence wasn't comforting.

Dante watched me recognize it. “My holding company has an interest in Arcway. I didn't approve the order. I'm finding out who did.”

“Your company destroyed my income and you want credit for investigating it?”

“No.” He pushed the schedule back toward me. “I want you to have the evidence. You can take it to your employer, a lawyer, anyone you trust.”

Doris arrived with the coffee pot. She studied Dante for a moment, then filled my cup. “Young lady, you want pie?”

“Not enough money.”

“Then tonight it's on me.”

Dante looked down at his untouched coffee. For the first time, he seemed to understand that money wasn't the only thing a person could give without being asked.

I reached for the schedule. Beneath it lay a photocopied sheet he hadn't meant to show me: a street plan marked VERNON UNDERPASS, TEMPORARY STORM CLOSURE. A small typed note at the bottom read, HISTORIC OBJECTION: E. KI.

I stopped breathing for a different reason.

“What's that?” I asked.

Dante covered the page too late.

“An old planning objection.”

“E. Ki. My name. Who filed it?”

His eyes flickered toward the window. “A man connected to a project my father ran years ago.”

“My father?”

“I don't know that.”

“Then why did you look at me like you knew me when I told you my name?”

A city bus groaned past outside. Dante waited until it had gone, though there was no reason the traffic should have decided when I got an answer.

“Because I saw that surname in a file two weeks ago,” he said. “The file concerned a worker who warned my father's company about a floodgate. The warning vanished. So did he.”

I stood so abruptly that my knees struck the underside of the table. Doris looked over from the counter.

“My mother said my father left before I was born.”

“Then I may have the wrong person.”

“You don't believe that.”

“No,” he admitted. “I don't.”

I picked up the schedule. “Whatever you know, send it to me. All of it. Don't put someone outside my building to explain it.”

He took out his phone, then stopped. “May I have a number?”

I almost laughed at the absurdity of a man whose people had found my address asking permission for my telephone number. But I appreciated that he asked. I gave him an email address instead.

On my way out, Lena called again. “Please tell me the meeting's over.”

“It is.”

“And?”

I looked at the Arcway banner visible at the far end of the block. Men in orange vests were fastening new barriers across the pedestrian walkway even though tomorrow's forecast called for another storm.

“I think someone got me fired because of my last name,” I said.

My phone vibrated with an email from my former manager. No greeting, no signature. Just an attached photograph of a municipal notice taped to the diner's back door.

CLEAR PREMISES BEFORE MONDAY. UNSAFE FLOOD CONDITIONS.