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your getting paid!” he shouts, his face screwed up. “Just let her die in peace. She deserves that much.”
    â€œWho is it?” a reedy voice calls from inside the dark house. “Is it Stephanie?”
    I shove the guy aside and shoulder my way through the door,using my big plastic basket. He shouts and follows me, but I’m too fast. Grief makes people slow, like moving through water. My mom was like that when my dad left. I was just a little kid, but I remember.
    I barrel down the hall, toward a room where machines hiss with quiet rhythm. An old woman huddles in the center of a swaybacked bed, surrounded by pillows. The smell of urine and worse lurks under the cheap air fresheners lined up on a windowsill. I slam the door shut and twist the lock, and the guy curses and yanks it from the other side.
    â€œStephanie?” she says, squinting.
    â€œAre you Eloise Framingham?” I ask, breathless, before I lose my nerve.
    â€œYes,” she rasps. She’s got tubes cascading down her face, and a pink silk scarf struggles to stay tied around her bald head. She’s nothing but bone, just paper skin collapsed around a flat, hollow frame. Her smooth, well-manicured hands are the only sign that she’s much younger than she looks, that she’s being eaten inside by disease. One hand flutters to her concave chest, the nails fake and thick and a beautiful, rosy pink. “Is that for me?” she asks.
    I smile and nod, my lips wobbling. “Could you sign this, please?”
    Her signature is just a jerky line, and she falls back against her pillows with a gasp of pain at the effort. I have never pitied someone so much in my life. And I hate myself for being grateful that whatI’m about to do will be as much of a mercy as it is a murder.
    I hold the first button of my shirt up to my mouth and whisper, “By Valor Congressional Order number 7B, your account is past due and hereby declared in default. Due to your failure to remit all owed monies and per your signature just witnessed and accepted, you are given two choices. You may either sign your loyalty over to Valor Savings as an indentured collections agent for a period of five days or forfeit your life. Please choose.”
    â€œI’m sorry?”
    I’ve read it so fast and low that there’s no way she could have heard anything over her machines. I walk across the worn carpet and hold out the card, and she takes it, her beautiful fingers trembling. And there’s no way she could do what I’m doing because there’s no way she can even stand up.
    â€œWhat the hell did you just say to her?” the guy shouts through the door, his body slamming against the wood. I just need it to hold a little longer.
    Eloise looks over the card, and my heart wrenches in my chest at how spastic and yet elegant her movements are. She must have been a dancer once. She’s like a dying queen, like a deer struck by a car trying to stand on severed legs. Her carved ivory eyes scan the card from purple hollows, and she meets my gaze and nods.
    â€œI don’t mind.” She holds her chin up. “And I forgive you.”
    She closes her eyes. I sit the basket gently on the ground. Theflimsy door is banging and slamming behind me, the lock about to break. Just as it flies open, I whip out the Glock and shoot Eloise Framingham in her bird-bone chest. She falls back onto the pillows with every bit of grace I imagined. Her lips curl up in a smile. I’m trembling, but she’s not. Not anymore.
    â€œWhat did you do?” the guy shouts. “What the hell did you just do?”
    He runs past me to the bed, holding the woman’s broken body to his chest and sobbing.
    â€œWhat was that?” a worried voice calls from the hall, and a college-­age girl in a tracksuit appears in the doorway.
    â€œCall the police!” the guy yells. “She shot my mom!”
    The girl gasps behind her hand and