The whole way to her mother’s, Raquel sensed someone waiting for her. He was behind the bus, or pretending to read the headlines at the news kiosk. He was the young man lurching toward her in a blue muscle shirt, or the older one in a cheap suit swearing into his phone.

Another block went by and no one jumped her.

Then another.

In five minutes, she would be able to double-lock the doors and eat bowls of cereal in her mother’s kitchen. If no one grabbed her before then, if she didn’t have a panic attack, she could spend the night in her old room. She’d already passed Belíssima Fashion and the Unibanco. With each building, fewer men looked as though they were waiting to cut her throat. She took in the red stilettos on sale at Lulu’s and the window after that, at the bookstore Livraria Cultura—where suddenly there was her mother’s face, blown up on a poster wide as a windshield, her unsettling green eyes magnified to the size of headlights.

Next to her mother’s face was an equally gigantic image of the cover of her last novel: a sandwich filled with tiny people squirming out the sides like fruitworms. Raquel had told her mother that the cover was too disturbing, that readers wouldn’t want to pick it up, and she’d been right. The book had been her mother’s least popular in years.

Although now, on the other side of the window, a woman in a Lycra sundress was picking up a copy and a man with a jowly face and mustache was waiting behind her to do the same. As they lifted the books from the stack, Raquel saw her mother’s face again, smaller, on the back of each copy and remembered her mother’s visit a few weeks ago, the Band-Aid on her neck. How long ago had it been? Her mother had said it was just a cut, that she’d gotten the rooster skin on her old neck caught in a zipper. But maybe it had been the knife of one of Flamenguinho’s men. Maybe he’d nicked her as a warning, or it had been the second time he’d pulled her mother off the street and the message had been, This time I will break your skin. From now on, if I let you go, you will be bleeding.