The world, according to Beatriz, made no exceptions for lovers. A flood was just as likely to carry away two devoted lovers in a bed as it was a house filled with cobwebs. A dengue-infected mosquito was just as likely to bite the back of a man kissing his wife as the knee of a politician while he hid the city’s coffers in his armoire.

And the world had made no exception for Marcus. Emma had slept with him, read his mother’s work to him while he lay so close to her she could hear his heart. None of it had kept him safe. They’d wired Rocha’s money to Flamenguinho immediately, but when she returned to her hotel at four, there was a shoe box inside a plastic bag waiting for her at the reception desk. It was an orange shoe box with the Nike logo on top. Inside, someone had placed a note and a sandwich-size plastic bag. Within the bag was a blood-crusted ear she had licked so recently she could still half taste it on her tongue.

The world made no exception for lovers. She had performed the sentence in English, had read it with a great sense of importance on a panel on Luso-Brazilian literature in Minneapolis and at a reading at the Barnes & Noble in Squirrel Hill. To get the sentence just right, she’d murmured it over and over, determined to re-create the spare beauty of its music, its somber tone.

Yet recalling the passage now, she felt numb to its beauty. All that registered was its desolation. She felt it with everything in her that could ache and break down. Because the world did not stop for lovers, Beatriz had written, lovers had no obligation to stop for the world or for the rain, for the beginning of a war or for its end. And there was nothing to be done about the lovers in the room next to Emma’s now, the sound of their headboard banging against the wall while she sat here, trembling.

Even mutilated, the shriveled-up flesh of Marcus’s ear looked particular, clearly belonging to a singular human form, just as the handwritten note was inexorably human in the inconsistent curves of its letters and the lunacy of its lines:

YOUR LOVER BOY CRIES LIKE

A GIRL.

YOU’RE GOOD FOR

FORTY MORE, TRANSLATOR.

SEND IT BY MIDNIGHT

OR I’LL SEND YOU A CHUNK

OF THE OTHER EAR.

SEND THE MONEY NOW

AND YOU GET YOUR

LOVER BOY

TOMORROW.

Emma translated the note several times, as if there were a chance that if she went over it again she might be able to come up with a less horrifying version, or could modify it so that it would suggest something slightly different, that Marcus was not tied up somewhere crying in pain or already unconscious by now. They must have put something on his head to bandage the wound. If they let him bleed to death or get an infection, there would be no money. She was fairly sure that was how kidnappings worked.

For the first time since she arrived in Brazil, she felt a longing for Pittsburgh, for the alphabetical order of the books above her desk and the plaintive meows of her cats, cries that required no more than a can opener and Fancy Feast to resolve.

She longed for her classroom, for her fastidiously maintained binder of attendance sheets. She even longed for her shared crappy office, to be sitting in a place where passion was nothing more than a conversation, a posturing to be defended behind a desk with a cup of tea.

If Miles cared enough to come here for her, maybe she would be a fool not to return with him. What was she doing here holding this other man’s ear? She didn’t know if she was in love with Marcus. For now, it didn’t matter.