"No," Karin said, the word tasting like cold iron on her tongue. It cut Clyde off before his sob could find a second wind. Clyde's lip trembled. "K-Karin—please. It's my mother. She's in the hospital. They need—forty thousand. I don't have—" She'd heard the same exact sentence a dozen times. Heard it last year, heard it in a life that bled out on the kitchen tile. That memory arrived with the clarity of a cut: the slick smell, the way light had bent weird against the blood, Clyde's hand on her wrist while Jana laughed in the doorway. The betrayal wasn't a blur. It was choreography. She had watched it once already. She had died from trusting the wrong people. Now the memory was a tool. Now the memory made her precise as a blade. Clyde opened his mouth again. He always did that—fill the silence with more rope. "You know I wouldn't lie. We've been—" "—together," Jana supplied, fast and saccharine, the practiced cadence of an innocent. Her fingers twined with a shopping bag as if she hadn't been the one who left lipstick on his collar last week. Karin watched them. The hallway smelled like disinfectant and old carpet. The building's fluorescent lights hummed. A couple of doors down, someone banged a pot like they were testing the walls. Small noises. Domestic life. Everything ordinary that had once made her soft. "Forty thousand