Rent on the Bronzeville apartment: a year's worth, paid ahead, so that the first of the month stopped being a small monthly emergency. The family debts that did not come in envelopes — the card she had maxed the winter her mother died, the loan from her aunt that everyone pretended was a gift and no one treated as one. Cleared, repaid, with interest she would insist on and her aunt would refuse twice before accepting.
And then — she hardly let the thought form, because forming it felt like spending it — school. DePaul. Her transcript, frozen one year from the end. The International Business degree she had walked away from in a hospital corridor two years ago, understanding even as she signed the withdrawal forms that people said "pause" and meant "end" all the time. One year. She could afford one year. The money did not merely pay bills. It gave back a future she had folded away as neatly as she folded napkins, and told herself she did not miss.
She became aware that her eyes were wet and that Karen was politely examining the evening's folder as if its contents were fascinating.
"Go home," Karen said gently. "Sleep on all of it. Don't sign anything, don't promise anything, don't answer unknown numbers tonight — actually—"
Gabi's phone buzzed against the sideboard.
Both of them looked at it. An unknown number. A text, in the preview, in careful formal English: Good evening, Miss Mensah. I assist Mr. Feng Jianguo. Confirming tomorrow morning, nine o'clock, at his hotel. A car can be sent if you wish.
Karen raised an eyebrow. "That unknown number," she said, "you can answer."
Gabi picked up the phone with hands that, she noted, were steady again, and began to type her reply beneath the windows over the river.
Chapter 10 — The Riverfront
Gabi woke before her alarm and lay in the dark listening to her father move around the kitchen in Bronzeville, slowly, the way he did everything now — the careful choreography of a man negotiating with a healing hip and refusing to ask for help with the kettle. By the time she had dressed, Emmanuel was at the table with the newspaper and a mug, and the ordinary morning of their apartment asserted itself so firmly around her that last night briefly seemed like something she had watched on television at someone else's house.
Then she checked her bank balance while the toast browned, and the comma was still there.
"You are up early for a girl with no shift," her father said.
"I have a meeting," Gabi said, and kissed the top of his head, and did not explain, because explaining would require deciding what she thought, and she had not decided yet.
On the train north she made a choice that had not been in Feng's invitation or anyone's instructions. She got off one stop early, in the bright cold off the river, and walked the long way — past the bridges, past the joggers and the coffee carts and the office towers coming awake — to where the fencing began. She wanted to see it before she sat in a hotel room and talked about it. She wanted the place itself to have a vote.
Halsted Yards, for now, was not yards and was barely a place. It was acreage behind chain-link fencing plastered with renderings: a park unspooling along the Chicago River in eternal June, glass towers holding the sky, families strolling through landscaping that no living plant had agreed to yet. In every rendering the ground was green. In every rendering the ground was innocent. A sign announced the vision of Harcourt Development Group and its international partners, and gave the project a value in the neighborhood of a billion dollars, and Gabi stood on the sidewalk with her coat buttoned to her throat and looked through the fence at the truth the renderings were standing on.
Weeds, mostly. Cracked concrete in slabs, stained in places with colors she did not have names for. The hulking bones of the old works at the far end, half-demolished and then abandoned mid-thought, as if the money for tearing down had paused to reconsider. A smell on the river wind that was not the river. She thought of the appendix's plain inventory. Cadmium in the soil. Trichloroethylene in the groundwater, creeping invisibly under all that pictured green, patient as only chemicals can be. Somewhere beneath her feet a solvent plume from a degreasing floor, older than she was, was still on its slow journey toward the water in those bright windows behind the chain-link.
A city notice, laminated and weather-faded, was wired to the fence beside the renderings, and because she was her mother's daughter she stopped and read all of it — the case numbers, the agency names, the invitation to view the public environmental filings. She photographed it with her phone. Then, standing there with her back to the traffic, she did what her years at DePaul had actually trained her to do before life interrupted the syllabus: she followed the paper.
The filings were online, public, and — this was the part that sat down heavily in her chest — not hidden at all. That was the obscenity of it. She sat on a bench by the riverwalk with her phone in both hands and scrolled through years of dry, dutiful documents that anyone could read and almost no one would: inspection summaries that used the same sedated vocabulary as Harcourt's English summary, trace this, historic that, beneath which, in the attachments, in the tables, the numbers said what the Chinese appendix had said. The contamination was worse in the older testing and better in the newer, depending on who had paid for the drill. The remediation estimates had been revised upward three times in five years, each revision footnoted like an apology. An advocacy group in a neighborhood Gabi had served tables to but never lived in had filed objections about the vapor risk and been answered with a form letter. The filings did not describe a conspiracy. They described something more ordinary and more damning: a project that everyone with a signature on it had reason to describe gently, and a poison that did not care how it was described.
She thought about Feng, nine o'clock, a hotel room, questions he wanted her in the room to ask. She understood now what she would be in that room. Not a translator. A witness who could not be summarized away — the waitress from Table Twelve, whose name was now attached to the story in a wire transfer, a commendation, and a threat. Harcourt had put her name into this project's bloodstream in front of the three people whose money he needed most, and no amount of quiet could take it back out. If Halsted Yards went forward on a buried warning, she would be one of the few people alive who could be said to have read the warning aloud. If it went wrong — if the ground answered back the way ground eventually does — her name would be in the telling of it, one way or another.