“Are you serious?” I asked. A bar of Balanchine Special Dark was usually three or four dollars, tops.

“Supply’s been scarce,” the vendor replied.

“You and I both know this isn’t even Balanchine,” I said. “What are you? Some kind of expert? Take it or leave it.”

I put the money on the table. Despite the cost, I was curious to see what was being sold in my father’s name.

Mr. Kipling stood a bit away from me while I was making this transaction. He didn’t want to be disbarred, I suppose.

I slipped the chocolate into my bag, and then Mr. Kipling walked me back to my apartment. “Should we talk about schools?” Mr. Kipling asked.

What was there to talk about? “Homeschooling seems like the only option at this point. I’ll study at home and try to get my GED before summer.”

“And after that? College?”

I looked at Mr. Kipling. “I think we both know that I am no longer college material.”

“That isn’t true!” He argued with me for a while, and I ignored him. “Anya, your father wanted you to go to college.”

If he’d lived, that might have been an option. “And Natty will,” I replied. “But you? What will you do instead?”

In the short term, I needed to find out who had killed Leo and ordered the hits on the rest of my family. As for long-term goals? It had begun to seem pointless for me to make any. “Mr. Kipling, I’m booked up,” I said lightly. “I’ve got my uncle’s funeral to attend, a cousin to visit in prison, and Win’s birthday party is next Saturday. The only thing I wonder is how I ever had time for school at all.”

Our walk had come to an end, and Mr. Kipling was giving me an annoyingly tragic face. “Okay, my dear, I’ll arrange to hire you a tutor.”

Just outside the front door of the apartment, someone had placed a medium-size box and an envelope. I carried both inside and set them on the kitchen counter. The envelope had no postmark, but envelopes were unlikely to contain explosives, so I opened that first.

It was a note:

Dear Anya,

Perhaps you remember me? My name is Sylvio Freeman. Syl. I had opportunity to meet you last fall when you interviewed at my school. I am aware that you are now back in the city, and for the moment at least, appear to have put your legal difficulties behind you. I had hoped you might speak at a Cacao Now meeting about your experiences. If this suits you, please come—

I tossed the note aside without bothering to finish reading it. I turned to the box. The postmark indicated Japan, and the return address was the Ono Sweets Company, which, of course, meant Yuji Ono. The box was surprisingly heavy. I debated whether to open it. There could be a bomb inside. And yet I doubted that if Yuji Ono wanted to finish me off, he would send a package with his own return address on it.

I retrieved my machete from my bedroom and sliced open the box. Inside was a gallon-size plastic bag filled with dust, and a small white card.

Leo.

Dear Anya,

I am sorry I am not able to come to New York to deliver this myself. I am detained by both business troubles and poor health. I am also sorry about the way we left things. The timing was very poor. Someday, I hope I will be able to better explain my behavior. So you know, I did have opportunity to view Leo’s body before cremation, but there was very little left of it. I do believe it was him. The corpse of his girlfriend, Noriko, was recognizable, and Leo has not been seen in Japan since.

You are still in my thoughts,

YUJI ONO

Oh, Leo.

Some part of me—my heart, I suppose—had hoped Leo’s death might be a mistake, but now I knew it wasn’t. The brain could not deny the evidence. Leo was dead.

I was glad that Natty was at school because I didn’t know what I wanted to say to her yet.

I set the ashes on the coffee table in the living room and contemplated my next move. Leo needed a funeral, but if I gave him one—if I, say, had him buried at the plot in Brooklyn—it could potentially implicate me in his escape. I did not relish the idea of a fifth stint at Liberty. So, perhaps Leo’s service could be informal: ashes scattered in the park on a sunny day, Natty reading a poem, etc. Did it really matter that Leo’s remains shared space with my parents’? They were all dead anyway.

I wanted to cry over Leo. I could feel the rusty gears turning behind my eyes and the tightening of my chest, but the tears would not come.

The longer I looked at Leo’s ashes, the more I began to feel, oddly enough, embarrassed. The steps I’d taken to keep Leo safe had been just the wrong ones. Look at the outcome! My father, wherever he was, would probably be ashamed of me.

I hadn’t moved for hours when Natty got home from school. Her eyes shifted from me to the bag to me. “Poor Leo,” Natty said before she sat down on the couch.

Natty leaned over the coffee table and picked up the bag by one of its corners, as if she wanted to make as little contact with it as possible. “Does it seem like enough is here? Leo was so tall.” She set Leo’s ashes back on the table. “I dreamed of him last night.”

“I didn’t hear you scream or anything.”

“I’m not a child anymore, Anya.” She rolled her eyes. “Besides, it wasn’t a nightmare. Leo was well and whole.” She paused. “I don’t think we should bury him. Leo wouldn’t like that. He liked being home with us. He liked being here.”

I told her I would pick out an urn next week.

I went into my bedroom. I took the chocolate bar out of my bag and set it atop my dresser. The bar looked so sweet and harmless lying there. Not deadly in the least.

On Saturday, I put on my trusty black dress, which I couldn’t have been sicker of wearing, and dragged myself to Uncle Yuri’s funeral, which wasn’t held at my church but at the Eastern Orthodox one that most members of the Family favored. I debated whether to take Natty but decided against it. Natty had known Uncle Yuri even less than I had, and I didn’t want to put her in proximity of our nearest and dearest. I debated whether to take my machete, but decided against that, too. Since I would be frisked, there was really no point. I did take one of the bodyguards Mr. Kipling had hired to stand guard outside our place—a brick wall of a woman named Daisy Gogol. She was six feet tall, had arms as thick as my legs, and was in need of an eyebrow and upper-lip wax. She was Natty’s and my favorite, though. Daisy Gogol had a melodious speaking voice. I once mentioned this to her and found out that she had studied to be an opera singer before moving into the more lucrative field of security. Natty reported that she had spotted Daisy Gogol feeding the birds on our balcony.

The funeral service was tedious as I felt almost nothing at Yuri Balanchine’s death. Daisy, however, wept copiously. I asked her if she had known Yuri. She hadn’t known him at all, but had been moved by the reading from Ecclesiastes. She clutched my hand in her meaty paw.

Since the night of the three attacks, I had not been in a room with anyone from the Family. In the front pew, Mickey sat next to his wife, Sophia. Fats was two rows behind them. The rest of the church was filled with employees of Balanchine Chocolate, some of whom were relatives I knew vaguely (but have found no need to mention in this narrative). It occurred to me that any of these people could have been responsible, or none of them. The world was very large, and at that age, I believed it to be filled with potential villains.

When it was my turn to view Yuri’s body, I leaned over the casket and crossed myself. The mortician had managed to erase the effects of Yuri’s stroke, and his face looked more symmetrical than it had the last time I’d seen him. His lips were painted an unnatural purplish hue, and I wondered what they had been trying to tell me that day in September. I thought of his other son, Jacks. He hadn’t been let out of prison for the funeral, but Yuri had been his father, too. And despite everything Jacks had or hadn’t done, on that day, I was able to manage a dust mote of pity for my poor cousin.