Ivy didn't sleep. She sat on her fire escape until the sky went gray, phone in her lap, reading the message over and over until the words stopped making sense as words and became something closer to a countdown.

She called Sterling at six in the morning. He picked up on the first ring, which told her he hadn't slept either.

"He texted me," she said, no preamble. "Not you. Me."

A beat of dead silence on the line, sharper than any shout would have been. "Read it to me."

She read it. She heard something in the background on his end, a chair scraping back fast, a door.

"I'm...