Fog rolled in from the river just past four in the morning, settling against the glass of every shopfront along Harmon Street. The bank sat halfway down the block, an old limestone building with brass-trimmed windows and a marble portico that looked like a tomb in the early dark. A single sodium lamp buzzed at the corner, throwing a sickly orange wash across the pavement and catching the mist in halos.
Cora Ellingham crouched beside the newspaper vending machine on the opposite sidewalk and watched the bank. She had been there for twenty minutes, her collar turned up against the chill, her hands buried in the pockets of her coat. The envelope in her left pocket felt heavier than paper ought to. She could feel its edge against her thumb, the faint ridge of the notary seal, the slick gloss of the stock.
She breathed against her scarf and watched the light over the service entrance at the side of the building.
A night janitor had emerged at ten past four, a thin man in coveralls who dragged a cigarette and looked at the sky as though he had forgotten what year it was. He disappeared around the corner. A second figure emerged shortly after, a woman in a dark coat carrying a metal case. She had a keycard on a lanyard and used it with the weary familiarity of someone who had done this a thousand times before.
Cora counted to sixty, then crossed the street.
The side door had been left ajar. Inside, a narrow corridor of beige tile and acoustic ceiling panels ran past a bank of mailboxes and a defunct water fountain. The air smelled of floor wax and old paper, a faintly sweet scent that caught at the back of the throat. Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, one of them flickering in a slow, sick rhythm. She kept her footsteps light, the rubber soles of her shoes whispering against the tile.
A security guard sat behind a half-moon desk near the elevator bank. He had a face like a walrus, thick and slack, and a newspaper folded open on the blotter in front of him. The crossword was half-finished. He glanced up as she approached, and the boredom in his eyes sharpened into something professional.
"Help you?"
"I have an appointment with Mr. Pyke," Cora said.
The guard consulted a leather-bound ledger. His thick finger traced down a column of names, pausing, then moving on.
"Name?"
"Ellingham. Cora Ellingham. Authorized representative for the estate of Lillian March."
He made a note in the ledger. She held her breath.
"ID."
She handed over the forged papers. They were crisp under his fingers as he turned them, the seal catching the fluorescent light. Her contact had done good work. The signature looked like ink. The notary stamp looked like ink. The watermark on the bond paper caught at the corner of her eye as he tilted it. She kept her face pleasant and uninterested.
The guard grunted, handed the papers back, and reached for the telephone.
"He'll be down in a minute. Have a seat."
There was a single vinyl chair against the wall, plus a rack of deposit envelopes and a potted fern that had seen better days. Cora sat. The vinyl sighed under her. She crossed her ankles and watched the elevator doors and tried not to think about the fact that she was sitting in the lobby of the First Mercantile Trust and Savings at four forty-five in the morning with a forged document and a letter in her pocket that named names that powerful people did not want named.
The elevator arrived with a soft chime.
Roland Pyke was a small man in a bow tie, balding, with the kind of pince-nez that perched on his nose like a mechanical bird. He carried a ring of keys and a cup of coffee, and he walked toward her with the brisk, polite trot of a man who had agreed to do a favor and wanted it over with quickly.
"Miss Ellingham," he said, extending a hand.
"Mr. Pyke. Thank you for seeing me."
He waved off the thanks with a motion that suggested he did not wish to discuss it. "I read your letter. It was quite a story. I will admit I had my doubts, but I spoke with Mr. Crowne, and he was very firm that you be given access. He is a man who pays attention to such matters, as I'm sure you know."
He did not wait for her response. He turned and walked back toward the elevator, and she followed, and the doors closed behind them with the soft sigh of expensive machinery.
"I must ask that you remain in the vault room at all times," Pyke said, watching the numbers climb. "And that you do not remove any item without first notifying me. There are certain protocols, as I am sure you understand."
"Of course."
"You do understand. That is good. Too many of our clients do not."
The vault was in the basement, of course. Two flights down, through a second corridor, and then a steel door that Pyke opened with a key from his ring and a six-digit code entered with one finger, carefully shielding the keypad with his body. The tumblers were loud in the stillness. The air inside was colder and drier, the way air gets when it is processed through climate control.
Rows of safe deposit boxes lined the walls, each one a small metal drawer with a brass label. Pyke led her to the far corner, where a particular drawer sat at knee height. He crouched, fitted a key into the lower lock, and turned it. Then he handed her a second key, smaller and polished from use.
"The key we provide is for the upper lock," he said. "Please."
Cora knelt and fitted the key. It turned smoothly. The drawer slid out with a soft, oiled whisper.
Inside was a metal box, perhaps twelve inches long and half that wide. It looked heavy. Cora lifted it out and set it on the small wooden table that Pyke had indicated. The table had been placed there for this purpose, she supposed. A reading lamp with a green glass shade stood at one end. She reached for the switch, and the lamp bloomed with warm amber light.
"I will step outside," Pyke said.
"Thank you."
He withdrew, and the door clicked shut behind him, and she was alone with the box.
Her hands were steady. She had expected them to shake, and they did not, and somehow that worried her more than shaking would have. She stood for a moment, her fingers resting on the cool metal of the lid, and looked at the lamp, and listened to the silence of the vault, which was a deep and careful silence, the silence of a room designed to keep secrets.
She lifted the lid.
Inside, on a bed of chamois leather, lay three objects: a manila envelope, thick with papers; a small leather journal, bound in red, with a tarnished clasp; and a brass key, old and ornate, of the sort that might fit a cabinet or a writing desk or a lock of an older vintage than anything she had ever seen. The key lay across the envelope as though it had been placed there deliberately, positioned by someone who wanted it noticed first.
Cora reached for the envelope first.
Inside she found a single sheet of paper, folded twice. The paper was heavy, cream-colored, the kind used for important correspondence in another era. The ink was brown with age, and the handwriting was careful, almost copperplate, with the loops of an older style.
She read it.
The letter was addressed to no one. It was a kind of testimony, written in a calm and deliberate hand, listing names and dates and amounts of money, describing meetings in rooms she did not recognize, and referencing documents she had never seen. The letter named a man she knew. The letter named two men she did not. The letter named a pharmacy on the west side, a warehouse near the rail yards, and a private club on Briar Hill. The letter ended with a single line, written in a slightly different hand, perhaps added later.
For Cora, if she has the courage. E. March.
She sat down on the small stool that Pyke had placed beside the table. Her knees had gone weak. She set the letter down and touched it with her fingertips, lightly, as though she were touching something holy or something cursed, and at the moment she could not tell which.
She reached for the journal.
The clasp was stiff. She worked it open and turned to the first page. The same handwriting as the letter, though looser here, more hurried. The first entry was dated March of 1947. The entries continued, day by day for the most part, though there were gaps, some of them weeks long. She skimmed, reading names, reading dates, reading figures that grew larger and more disturbing as the pages went on. She read until her eyes watered, and then she read some more.
When she looked up, the lamp was flickering.
She did not know how long she had been there. She only knew that her tea had gone cold and her hand was cramped around the pen she did not remember picking up, and that she had filled three pages of her notebook with names and dates and cross-references, and that what she had read was enough to end careers and possibly lives.
She put the letter and the journal into her satchel, together with the brass key, which she wrapped in a handkerchief to keep it from scratching anything else. She closed the metal box and slid it back into the drawer. She locked the drawer and handed Pyke the key when he returned.
"You found what you were looking for," he said, watching her face.
"I found more than I was looking for."
"That is usually how it goes in vaults."
She did not trust herself to say anything else. She rode the elevator up and walked across the lobby and out the side door and into the fog, and the morning was just beginning to gray the east, and the sodium lamp was still buzzing, and she stood on the sidewalk for a moment and let the cold air fill her lungs until she could breathe evenly again.
She began to walk.
The fog swallowed the sound of her heels on the pavement. She walked north, then east, then north again, the satchel growing heavier against her hip with every block, though the weight had not changed. It was the knowledge inside it. She could feel the letter and the journal pressing against her ribs through the leather, and she resisted the urge to stop on a bench, to open the satchel, to read the words again, because she had read them once and they were already inside her now, and she could not unread them.
She found a coffee shop three blocks from the bank, a narrow place with a green awning and fogged windows, and she ordered a cup of black coffee and carried it to a table at the back, away from the door. Her hands were shaking. She wrapped them around the cup and let the heat soak into her palms and watched the steam rise and thin and vanish.
The waitress, a woman with tired eyes and a pencil stuck behind her ear, brought the check without being asked. "You need anything else, hon?"
"No. Thank you."
"You look like you seen a ghost."
"Something like that."
The waitress touched her shoulder as she passed, a small, absent gesture, the kind of kindness strangers offer in the early morning when the world is still soft. Cora nodded her thanks and did not look up again until the woman had gone back behind the counter.
She took the notebook from her sval and opened it to the pages she had filled at the desk. She read what she had written, checking her own hand, making sure the names matched the entries in the journal. They did. She had copied them carefully, in her small, slanted script, and the names were clear. She turned the pages. The first entry was March 1947. The last entry was June of the previous year. Forty-six years of records. Forty-six years of something she did not yet have a word for, though she had a feeling the word would come, and she had a feeling she would not like it.
She closed the notebook and put it away and drank her coffee, which had gone lukewarm. She sat with the cup between her hands and watched the fog press against the window and tried to think what to do next.
She could go to Dennis Harlan. That was the proper channel, the responsible thing. Take the evidence to her editor, lay it out, let the paper decide what to do. Dennis would know the lawyers. Dennis would know the publishers, the men who could shepherd a story like this past the censors and the advertisers and the men in dark suits who liked to telephone editors in the middle of the night. Dennis would also know how to bury it. Dennis had buried things before. She had seen the pattern, the way certain stories were spiked, the way certain sources were never quoted again, the way certain subjects turned into dead air the morning after Dennis had a closed-door meeting with someone whose name never appeared in print.
She did not want to go to Dennis. Not yet.
She could go to Marcus Vale, the security chief at the paper, the man who handled the building and the filing system and the quiet business of making sure certain documents stayed where they were put. Marcus was loyal to the paper, or seemed to be, and he had a fondness for her that she had never encouraged and never quite understood. She had interviewed him once, for a feature on building safety after a small fire in the mailroom, and he had spoken to her for two hours about his philosophies on locks and keys. She had found him unsettling in a way she could not articulate. She found him more unsettling now.
She could go to no one. She could go home. She could lock the satchel in her apartment and sit with what she knew and try to decide whether knowing was a kind of madness, and whether ignorance was a kind of safety, and whether she had any right to choose for other people what they should know.
The fog thinned outside. A streetcar appeared at the corner, rang its bell, vanished into the gray. The waitress refilled her cup without asking and went away again.
Cora opened the satchel. She took out the journal and turned to the back pages, the ones she had only skimmed. The handwriting grew looser toward the end, the lines slanting, the letters crowding one another as if the writer had been afraid of running out of space or time. She read slowly. She read carefully. She copied a passage into her notebook, word for word, in her own hand, so that she would have it in her own script and her own possession and could not later be told she had imagined it.
The passage read: They do not know what they have built. They think it is a ledger. It is a list. It is a roll of the willing, and the unwilling, and the bought, and the broken. They have been keeping it for forty years. They will keep it for forty more unless someone stops them. I have tried to stop them and I have failed. I am tired. I am old. I am afraid of what comes after me, which is why I am writing this down, which is why I am putting it where it cannot be found until it is too late to do anything but read it.
She read the passage twice. She read it a third time. Then she closed the journal and put it away and sat with her hands in her lap and watched the fog and tried to breathe.
The journal was not new. The journal had been there for years, decades, waiting. The key had been in the brass box. The key had been waiting too. And now she had it, and she had read it, and she could feel the weight of it in the satchel the way she had once felt the weight of a story she had not yet earned, a story that would change her if she let it, a story she could not unknow.
She finished the coffee. She paid the waitress. She walked out into the morning, which had begun to clear, the fog retreating westward in slow, ragged strips, the sun a pale disk behind a veil of cloud.
She walked toward the office because there was nowhere else to walk. The newspaper was on the far side of downtown, twenty blocks from the coffee shop, and she walked the whole way without hurrying, the sval against her hip, the notebook in her coat pocket, the weight inside her growing with every step.
The building was brick and stone, four stories, with the paper's name in iron letters above the door and a brass plaque by the entrance that listed the publishers and the founding date. She had walked under that sign a thousand times. She had never noticed how heavy the iron looked, or how the letters seemed to lean, slightly, as if they were tired.
She took the stairs because the elevator was slow. She climbed past the press room on the second floor, where the night men were still at their stations, the linotype machines clattering in their rhythms, the air thick with ink and heat. She climbed past the mailroom on the third floor, where the bundles of returns sat in their crates, and the night porter nodded to her without speaking. She climbed to the fourth floor, where the editorial offices were, where her desk was, where Dennis Harlan had his office with the glass door and the venetian blinds and the small bronze nameplate that read D. HARLAN, CITY EDITOR.
The door was open. Dennis was inside, standing behind his desk with his coat on, as if he had just come in or was just going out. He looked up when she passed the glass, and his face changed. The smile came first, the easy, avuncular smile he kept for subordinates and sources. Then something else came behind it, something she could not read, something that was there and gone before she could name it.
"Cora." He came to the door. "You're early. Or late. I can never tell with you."
"I had an errand."
"At this hour?"
"It ran long."
He studied her face. She knew he was reading her the way he read copy, looking for the tell, the soft spot, the place where the truth leaked through. She kept her face still. She had practiced that look in mirrors for years, and she had gotten good at it.
"Come in," he said. "Sit down. You look like you've been up all night."
"I haven't slept."
"Join the club."
She went in. She sat in the chair across from his desk, the one with the worn leather and the slight list to the left. He closed the door behind her, which he did not usually do, and he did not sit. He stood behind his desk with his hands in his pockets and watched her the way a man watches a fuse.
"What did you find?" he said.
She did not answer immediately. She set the sval on her lap and kept her hand on the flap.
"It's a big story," she said.
"How big?"
"Big enough that I don't want to talk about it here."
He raised an eyebrow. "You're in my office."
"I know where I am."
"Then you know I can help you."
"I know you can bury it."
The words came out before she could stop them, and they hung in the air between them, and she watched his face. The smile came back, but smaller, and tighter.
"That's not fair, Cora."
"Is it true?"
"It's not that simple."
"It's never simple with you, Dennis. That's the problem. It's never simple, and it never gets printed, and the sources disappear, and the story goes cold, and we move on to the school board and the ribbon cuttings and the human interest."
He came around the desk. He leaned against the front of it, close to her chair, close enough that she could smell the coffee on his breath and the faint, sharp scent of the bay rum he used.
"What do you have?" he said. His voice had dropped.
"A journal."
"What kind of journal?"
"A ledger. With names. And dates. And figures."
He was very still.
"Whose names?"
"People who work here. People who used to work here. People who own things. People who are supposed to be on our side."
He did not move for a long moment. Then he put his hands on the arms of her chair and leaned in, and his face was close to hers, and his eyes were not smiling.
"You need to give me that journal, Cora."
"I don't think I do."
"You need to think very carefully about what you're doing."
"I have thought about it."
"Not enough. Not nearly enough."
The office was quiet. Downstairs, the presses were winding down for the morning run. She could hear the distant clatter, the rhythm she had grown up listening to, the sound that had drawn her into this work in the first place.
"I'm going to write the story," she said.
"You're going to do nothing of the kind."
"Watch me."
He straightened. He stepped back. His face had gone flat and pale, and she saw a version of him she had never seen before, a version she suspected had always been there.
"You don't understand what you're holding," he said.
"Then help me understand."
He looked at the sval. He looked at her face. He looked at the door.
"Leave it with me," he said. "Just for now. Until I can make some calls. Until I can find out what we're dealing with."
"No."
"Cora."
"No, Dennis."
He went still again. Then he reached into his coat and took out his keys and opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a small leather notebook and wrote something in it, without looking at her, and then he closed the notebook and put it back.
"All right," he said. "Have it your way. But don't say I didn't warn you."
"Warn me about what?"
He did not answer. He opened the door for her and stood aside, and she walked out past him with the sval against her hip and the journal inside it and the notebook in her pocket, and she did not look back, and she walked past the empty desks and the humming fluorescent lights and the windows that looked out over the fog-shrouded city, and she took the stairs down to the lobby and the lobby to the street and the street into the gray morning, and she kept walking.
The fog had thickened while she was inside, or perhaps she had simply walked far enough to reach its denser folds. The streetlamps along Marston Road burned pale orange through the murk, their light diffusing into soft halos that bled into nothing a few feet above the pavement. Her breath came out in visible plumes. The sval pressed cold against her hip through the wool of her coat, a small persistent chill that she was aware of with every step, the way one is aware of a stone in a shoe, or a name one is trying not to think.
She had walked six blocks before she realized she did not have a plan.
The thought arrived with a strange, almost clinical clarity, as if some detached portion of her mind had been observing the proceedings and had finally offered its assessment. She had the sval. She had the journal. She had the notebook in her pocket with its terse, damning entry. She had, now, an enemy in Dennis Harlan who had been her mentor for nine years and who, until twenty minutes ago, she had believed she understood. She had no editor willing to run her piece. She had no source willing to go on record. She had no office to return to and no desk to sit at and no coffeepot to pour from in the familiar, well-rehearsed rhythm of a workday.
She had the story.
She kept walking.
The bank was three blocks behind her now, a shape she could no longer make out in the fog. She had not looked back to check, but she could feel the building receding, feel the particular gravity of that place loosening its hold on her one degree at a time. The fog swallowed sound the way it swallowed sight. The traffic on the cross streets was a distant, muffled wash, more felt than heard, and the only noises close to her were her own footsteps on the wet pavement and the faint, papery rustle of the elm trees that lined the sidewalks of the older residential blocks. The leaves had turned but had not yet fallen, and they hung in pale yellow clusters that caught the lamplight and held it.
She was passing a small park, one of the vest-pocket green spaces that the city had preserved from some earlier, more generous era, when she became aware of footsteps behind her. Not immediately alarming; the city was full of footsteps at all hours, and she had learned years ago to distinguish the rhythms that meant something from the rhythms that did not. But these were different. These were deliberate. These were the footsteps of someone who was not trying to overtake her, but was also not trying to fall behind, and was maintaining a precise and unhurried distance, perhaps twenty feet, perhaps less.
She did not turn around. She adjusted her pace, slowing very slightly, and felt the footsteps behind her slow in kind, exactly, as if they were connected to her own by some invisible mechanism. Her heart climbed into her throat. She thought of the sval and the journal and the photograph, and she thought of Dennis Harlan, and she thought, with a cold clarity that surprised her, that there were more efficient ways to ensure a story never ran than simply killing the journalist, and one of them involved making sure the journalist understood exactly how thoroughly she was being watched.
She turned the corner onto Birch.
The footsteps turned with her.
She walked another fifty feet, past darkened brownstones and shuttered shopfronts, and then she stopped, quite deliberately, in the pool of light beneath a streetlamp, and she turned around and looked at whoever was following her.
He was a tall man, broad through the shoulders, wearing a dark overcoat and a dark hat and carrying himself with the particular upright economy of someone whose profession required him to be aware of his body at all times. He was perhaps sixty. His face was weathered and clean-shaven, and his eyes, beneath the brim of the hat, were sharp and pale and missed nothing. He stopped when she stopped. He stood where he was, twenty feet away, and he regarded her with the patient, assessing look of a man who had decided some time ago exactly how this encounter was going to go.
"Mrs. Ellingham," he said.
His voice carried easily across the distance, pitched low and unhurried, the voice of a man accustomed to addressing people who had no choice but to listen. She did not recognize him, but she recognized the type. She had interviewed men like him before, for stories about the docks, about the railyards, about the private security firms that did work the police did not want to do, and they all carried themselves in this same watchful, contained way, as if the rest of the world were a kind of weather they had learned to endure.
"Who are you?" she said.
"My name is Marcus Vale," he said. "I am the chief of security for the First Mercantile Trust. I believe you have something that belongs to my employer."
She did not move. She did not, consciously, change her expression, though she felt something cold pass through her midsection, a kind of internal bracing.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Mrs. Ellingham." He took a step toward her. Not aggressive. Patient. The way a man steps toward a nervous animal. "I have been in that building for thirty-one years. I know every sound it makes at every hour of the day and night. I know the particular sound the main door makes when it is opened after hours, because I have had occasion to hear it before, and I have had occasion to respond. I know the sound of the elevator in the north stairwell, because it has a small catch in its descent that no one has ever bothered to repair. I know the sound your shoes made on the marble floor of the lobby, because they are the shoes of a woman who walks as if she is thinking about something else. I have spent the last forty-five minutes following those sounds, and the sounds have led me here, to you, and to the sval you are carrying against your left hip, beneath your coat."
She looked at him. He looked at her. The fog moved between them in slow, pale drifts.
"You should know," he said, "that I am not here to retrieve the sval. I have no interest in the sval. I have no interest in whatever is inside it. I have, in the course of my career, learned that there are certain items which, once removed from the building in which they were placed, are best left removed, and I am not fool enough to insert myself into the chain of custody."
"Then what do you want?" she said.
"I want you to understand," he said, "that you have been seen. By me, specifically, tonight. And that being seen by me, on this occasion, has consequences you may not have considered."
He took another step toward her, and then another, and then he stopped, perhaps eight feet away, near enough that she could see the fine lines around his eyes and the particular set of his mouth, which was the mouth of a man who had delivered many difficult messages and had learned to deliver them without sentiment.
"I am not a young man, Mrs. Ellingham," he said. "I have, over the course of my career, been required to be many things, and to do many things, and to know many things that I would have preferred not to know. I have served three different families in this city, and I have watched each of them in turn arrive at the same conclusion, which is that the things they have placed in our vault are the things they most need to be rid of, and they have paid us a great deal of money to make sure those things are never seen again. I have honored that arrangement, because it is my profession to honor arrangements. But I am not blind. I am not deaf. And I am not, despite what my employers believe, indifferent to the nature of the things I have been paid to keep."
He paused. The fog drifted. A car passed on the cross street, its headlights a pale smear in the murk.
"Tonight," he said, "I heard you in the vault. I did not intervene, because it was not my place to intervene, and because I had taken the measure of you when you walked in and I judged, correctly as it turns out, that you were not there to commit a theft. You were there to take possession of something that had been placed in our care under circumstances that I am no longer certain were legitimate. And I let you take it, because it seemed to me, in the moment, that the taking of it was the right thing."
She said nothing. She was aware, very precisely, of the weight of the sval against her hip, and the weight of the journal inside it, and the weight of the notebook in her pocket, and the weight of the man standing eight feet away from her in the fog, telling her things she had not expected to be told.
"I am going to let you go, Mrs. Ellingham," he said. "I am going to do this, and I want you to understand that I am doing it at some cost to myself, and that I am not doing it out of any particular regard for you, because I do not know you and have no reason to regard you. I am doing it because I am tired. I am doing it because I have been a party, for thirty-one years, to arrangements that I am no longer willing to be a party to. And I am doing it because you came into that building tonight, and you took what you took, and you did not look like a thief. You looked like a woman who had discovered something she could not leave in the dark."
He reached into his coat. She flinched, involuntarily, and he paused, and held up his hand, palm out, a gesture of reassurance, and then he took from his coat, slowly and deliberately, a small camera, one of the old folding kind that required the operator to look down into the viewfinder and that made a sharp, decisive sound when the shutter was released.
"I am going to take your photograph," he said. "This is not optional, and I want you to understand why. I am going to take your photograph, and I am going to keep that photograph, and I am going to look at that photograph on the day, which will come, when someone asks me what happened to the contents of box seven four nine. I am going to look at your photograph, and I am going to remember your face, and I am going to say, in that moment, what I am saying to you now, which is that I let you go, and that I let you go with regret, and that I am not the man you should be afraid of."
He raised the camera. He looked down into the viewfinder. She stood very still, in the pool of light, and the shutter clicked, once, twice, three times, a small sharp sound in the fog, and he lowered the camera and put it back in his coat and looked at her again, and his face, in the lamplight, was the face of a man who had done a thing he had been thinking about doing for a long time and who was now standing in the consequences of it.
"Go home, Mrs. Ellingham," he said. "Write your story. But understand that you are being watched, and that there are people in this city who will do what they have always done, which is to ensure that certain things remain unsaid. And when they come for you, as they will, do not come back to me. I have given you what I have to give, and I have nothing more."
He turned. He walked past her, into the fog, and the fog took him, the way fog takes everything, gradually and without ceremony, and within a few seconds he was gone, and she was alone on the sidewalk beneath the lamplight, with the sval and the journal and the notebook and the knowledge, cold and specific, that the story she was carrying had just become larger than she had understood.
She stood there for a long time. The fog moved. The traffic murmured. Somewhere in the distance, a train sounded its horn, low and long, and the sound rolled through the city and was gone.
She turned, finally, and began to walk home.