They were all fading now on the balcony—her mother’s beloved persimmon trees. Raquel had tried more water and then less but it didn’t seem to matter. Whatever she had given or withheld, the four fruits whose skin had been ripening to a deep orange in her mother’s care had now wilted to a rotting brown.

Whether they were dying or not, she’d made Marcus promise to keep tending them after she left this morning for Salvador. If they gave up this fast on her mother’s trees, what was next? What if their mother suddenly came home and found them out there, abandoned?

You need to piss on them, Thiago had told her yesterday at work. He said his grandfather swore by a little female urine for a failing tree. Something about the hormones in a woman’s pee, especially right after she woke up. You should sleep there and piss all over them first thing in the morning, he’d advised her, and though she had yet to squat over the persimmons, his counsel had been helpful, as she’d realized she was not as upset or determined to save them as she had thought.

She’d at least solved the problem of Emma before heading to Salvador. As Emma was finally going back to Pittsburgh today, Raquel hadn’t told her about her flight this morning. She didn’t want to risk that Emma might stick around. She was certain that her hunch wasn’t like Emma’s. Her mother had been writing about Salvador just before she vanished and hadn’t finished. Even Thiago had agreed that she should go. It’s an awful time for you to be out, he had said, but you need to go and find your old lady. Tell her to get back in her tree, where she belongs.

With Thiago’s blessing, Raquel had felt fairly at ease until she reached the airport. At her terminal, she started to feel someone watching her. Or she was getting paranoid. To calm herself, she bought two ham-and-cheese salgados, but they only made her thirsty and bloated. In the Thursday paper there’d been a picture of three women piled like chicken parts in a shopping cart, their limbs so brutally mutilated it was hard to tell where one body ended and another began. It was entirely possible that one of Flamenguinho’s men was here now, would stalk her in Salvador until she found her mother and then slaughter them both.

On the news, when they reported the deaths, all they’d say was that she was Beatriz Yagoda’s daughter. They’d flash an image of her round, ordinary face for a second, maybe two, before going back to her green-eyed, high-cheekboned mother receiving the Jabuti Prize at twenty-nine on TV. And that would be it, her life over. Thiago would go home to his wife and his children and hire someone younger to replace her.

Raquel squeezed her head between her palms, unsure of what to do, wondering if she should just go back home. But to what? She’d already taken the days off work and spent four hundred reais on her ticket. It was too late to get back her deposit on the hotel. Balancing the expense against her fear, she boarded the plane. Ahead of her in line was a tall bald man with a thick keloid scar across the back of his neck. A knife scar.

Or just a scar from a fall from a horse. Or out of a car. She ran a hand over her hot face. Her mouth felt so dry it was an effort to swallow. She was going to have to find some way to stop this paranoia. All day long she dealt with union leaders shouting at her. They got right up in her face, threatening to coerce every miner in Brazil to walk out on PetroXM, and she stared them down. She wasn’t going to fall apart now. She just had to focus on the aisles one at a time, on the chubby little girl who had just peered over the top of a seat and then disappeared. Raquel forced herself to concentrate on that seat, on seeing the round face of that girl again. But when she got closer, there was no child in the row. Only a middle-aged woman picking at her cuticles and reading Have You Tasted the Butterflies by Beatriz Yagoda.