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Just a few more blocks. I pumped my arms faster, increasing my speed, feeling my bangs stick to my forehead with sweat.
    I reached Eleventh Street and dropped to a walk, letting my breath catch up with me. It was heaven to jog without al my winter layers, to let the breeze hit my bare legs, to let the run shake off the thoughts of that letter, those two sentences that I carried constantly in my brain. I’d spent the last few weeks obsessing about who had sent it to me. I wouldn’t show it to my dad, and I had no guesses myself. On a long shot, I interrogated my mailman, but he could only tel me the bit of information I already knew—that the envelope had original y been sent from here in Manhattan. Which left me with mil ions of residents to consider, not to mention the mil ions of tourists.
    I slowed even more when I reached the display of flowers on the sidewalk that signaled my favorite Korean grocery store. A few weeks ago there’d been prom carnations and roses that looked hair-sprayed—winter flowers—but now there were tulips, bright-colored and fresh. Inside the crowded shop, I picked up a bottle of grapefruit juice and a mammoth Sunday New York Times. Buying that paper every weekend made me feel like a native, one of those people who acted as if it was no big deal to live here, in one of the largest, craziest cities in the world. Maddy was like that. So were many of the associates at my firm. Manhattan lingo rol ed off their tongues with ease. They’d say, “I’m going to the Korean,” instead of “the Korean deli,” or “I’m heading to Seventy-sixth and Lex” not “Seventy-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue.”
    I, on the other hand, had never been truly comfortable in Manhattan, despite my three years there during law school and the last five years of private practice. I’d thought the accumulation of years, together with the fact that my father stil lived in Manhasset on Long Island, would bring me a sense of contentment. But no matter how often I put myself in the thick of things, no matter how much I tried to convince myself, I always felt a little off, a little like an impostor. It was why I jogged the chaotic streets, picking my way past too many obstacles, like pedestrians and baby strol ers and bicyclists, instead of heading for the river or Battery Park. I had this notion that if I constantly placed myself in the middle of the urban crunch it would soak in, and I’d final y feel as if I belonged.
    I finished the juice while waiting in line to pay, picking the pulpy bits off my lips. I showed the bottle to the cashier when I reached him.
    “How are you today, Hailey?” the cashier said. He was a short Korean man with a wide bald head.
    “Good, Shin. How are you?” We had a few seconds of light chatter while he rang me up. Shin was the reason I went to that store; someone, other than my co-workers, who knew my name.
    I threw the bottle in a trash can outside the store, feeling a cool trickle of sweat slide down my spine, then walked in the direction of Ninth Street. I balanced the paper on one arm, while I flipped to the business section.
    “Shit!” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.” The headline read, Online McKnight Store In Trouble?
    McKnight Corporation was one of my clients— one of my newest, biggest clients—and I was scheduled to leave for Chicago that night to represent them at a federal arbitration. Until then, I hadn’t been as nervous as I usual y would be in an arbitration. I’d been more focused on that letter and the fact that Chicago was right across the lake from Woodland Dunes, the town where I’d lived until I was seven. The town where my mother, Leah Sutter, had died.
    The night I had received the letter, Maddy and I split a bottle of wine, then another, talking for hours. Why, Maddy had demanded, did I think the stupid little note was about my mother? It was probably just a cruel prank, she said. By that time I was sure that the letter was about Leah Sutter, but I