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She talked about her life at school in Kenya. The uniforms, the exams, the way her mother’s voice changed whenever she said the word America. She told me about her aunt’s shop and her parents stretching themselves to the limit so she could study. She told me her sorority sisters had given her aunt a name, Mama Mwende for the food she always shared. It had a nice ring to it, but I did not tell her that.

She told me how the sisterhood at university made her feel included and accepted. I almost told her about the Bratva, but decided it wasn’t a good comparison. There was so much she had learned from the diverse community around her uncle’s shop. The good and the bad. The customers who paid in cash and stories. The old man who settled his tab in proverbs.

She was far too trusting. No wonder she got kidnapped.

❦ ❦ ❦

Jackson, Mississippi, known for its soul and food.

We reached it as the heat began to soften. I parked the sedan in a space near the back of the lot, nose out, two rows from the entrance, and killed the engine. I did not move. Sixty seconds. I counted them.

The Walmart Supercenter squatted before us, a flat white box the size of an aircraft hangar, its blue sign buzzing against a sky the colour of old copper. Heat shivered off the asphalt. A fuel station sat at the edge of the lot, trucks idling by the pumps. Somewhere in the trees a cicada sawed at the afternoon. A man sold peanuts out of the back of a pickup, and the steam from his pot drifted across the rows of cars.

“Rules,” I said.

She was already unbuckled and bouncing in her seat. “It’s so big. The girls have travelled to so many more places than me.” Her flip-flops slapped the floor mat, lime green, a size too big, bought from a gas station two hundred miles back. She had worn them like glass slippers ever since.

“You will listen to me.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“This is not a holiday.”

“Mm-hmm.”

She popped the glovebox open, searching for tissues. Her hand came back with the grenade.

She held it up between two fingers, studying it with the same intelligence she had once applied to my rope. “I can keep this for protection.”

I took it from her hand. Gently, but not slowly. I slid it into my coat pocket and felt its dead weight settle against my ribs.

“I will protect you.”

The words hung in the car. I heard them only after they had left me.

Her eyes widened. A smile began at the corner of her mouth, and I knew, with the certainty of stepping onto a mine, that it must not be allowed to grow.

I cleared my throat. “Protocol.”

“Protocol,” she repeated, delighted.

“You stay by my side.” My voice came out gruff. “No wandering off. My cap stays on at all times. You do not speak to strangers.”

“Not even the greeter?”

“Especially not the greeter.”

I stepped out first. The heat closed over me, damp and heavy. I scanned the car park, row by row. A white pickup, engine ticking. A dark SUV reversing into a space, driver staying behind the wheel. A woman loading toddlers into the back of a minivan. Then the shop fronts along the edge of the lot, a nail salon, a mattress store, a vape shop with a painted cactus in the window. Every car that parked, I tracked. Every face that turned.

I opened her door. She had already swung her legs out, flip-flops slapping against the asphalt, my cornflower shirt hanging to her thighs. A few heads turned. I lowered the brim of my cap.

“Oh!”

She was gone. Three steps across the tarmac, bent double over something that glinted in the heat.

“A penny,” she called over her shoulder. “A lucky penny!”

I caught a fistful of cornflower cotton at her shoulder and hauled her back like a kitten.