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It wasn’t a bad sound. It was a triumphant one, a long mechanical shudder followed by a cascade into the bin. Rod came flying out of the kitchen like a man whose child had spoken her first word.

“She did the sphere!” he announced to the empty kitchen while holding up a round hunk of frozen water. “On her own. I didn’t even ask. She just—she offered.”

“That’s great, Rod,” Finn said, not looking up from whatever paperwork he was handling.

“You don’t understand.” He held up the ice sphere, clear as glass, perfectly round. “Look at her work.”

“It’s a very round ice cube,” Finn said, finally glancing up at me as if to say, “Can you help me here?”

“It’s a sphere, Finn. There’s a difference. A cube is a compromise. A sphere is a decision.” He carried it back to the kitchen cupped in both hands like a dragon’s egg. Finn and I watched him without another word because a man should be allowed to love what he loves, even when what he loves makes forty pounds of nugget ice a week and texts him about its filter.

I shook my head, exchanged a grin with Finn, and went back to opening the mail. That was where the afternoon went sideways, quietly, the way the bad ones did. It didn’t go south with a bang. It did it with an envelope.

Most of our mail was the usual invoices, a linen service upselling cloth napkins we didn’t want, and a coupon book addressed to OCCUPANT. Tucked between the electric bill and a menu from a Thai place was a single business card. There was no envelope. It looked like someone had simply slid it into the stack by hand. The card was made of heavy, cream-colored stock. The writing was embossed.

“MERIDIAN COMMERCIAL PROPERTIES,” it said. Under that, a name, and under that, in a smaller, politer font, “Representing the ownership interests of your property. Let’s talk about your options.”

I read it twice. I turned it over. The back was blank, which somehow made it worse. A blank back is a card that expects a phone call.

“Finn,” I said.

He was now standing at Rod’s stainless steel counter cutting limes. Something in my voice made him set the knife down, which Finn rarely does for much of anything.

“What?”

I held up the card.

He wiped his hands on a towel and rounded the counter. I handed him the card, and he read it. His face did the thing his face did when news was the kind you didn’t say out loud.

He went still. He read it again. Then he looked toward the kitchen where Rod was murmuring to an ice machine, then toward the back where Benji was doing inventory and singing. He lowered his voice to the register we kept for exactly two topics: money and death.

“Where’d this come from?”

“It was in the mail. No envelope.”

“‘Representing the ownership interests’?” Finn flipped it over, found the same blank back I’d found, and didn’t like it any better. “That’s an expensive card to say, ‘Your landlord’s talking to somebody.’”

“It might be nothing.” I heard myself say it. “Could be a mass mailing. They send these to every business on the block, fishing. Real estate agents do that.”

“They do.”

“It’s probably nothing,” I heard myself say.

“Probably.” Finn handed the card back. Neither of us believed it was nothing. For seven years, we’d been in this building. Our lease ended or renewed at the end of the year. I’d been meaning to call about the renewal but hadn’t because the ice machine died, and then I went to a bathhouse, and then my whole life became a series of men not wanting to know my name. The renewal had slid down a list it should’ve been at the top of.

“I’ll call them,” I said. “The owner, not”—I flicked the card—“these people. I’ll call the actual owner and find out what’s what.”

“Do that.” Finn glanced around the kitchen again. “And Mark, let’s keep this between us. There’s no sense worrying everybody over a business card. Rod just got Reina to make spheres. Benji’d write the bar a eulogy before we knew anything for certain. Jacks . . . shit . . . Jacks might curl into a massive, wide-receiver-shaped ball and cry the corner into a flood zone.”

“Agreed.”

“The family doesn’t need a ghost story till we know there’s a ghost.” Finn’s accent somehow made that sound more pleasant—or more ominous. I wasn’t sure.

“Right.”

Finn went back to his limes. I put the card in my shirt pocket, where I could feel it the rest of the afternoon, a small, stiff rectangle sitting right over the spot that had been unclenching lately and was now, quietly, clenched again.

I told myself it was nothing.