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The road beyond the white security gate, fringed by the rich green foliage of June, curved gently out of sight. “The code?” Conor couldn’t remember anything from John Price about a gate code. “That’s not an intercom?” The cabdriver shook his head.

“You need a code to get in,” he said. Conor tried calling John, but the connection immediately failed—just a lonely bar of finicky service. The driver’s phone wasn’t picking up a signal, either.



“Maybe you can walk,” the man suggested as his flimsy mask slipped down his nose, as it had many times throughout the ride. Conor was glad his mother was safely cocooned in their apartment back in Yonkers, where nearly everyone was still covering up in public spaces. The map on his phone wasn’t loading, so he didn’t know where exactly to find John’s house on this two-mile pinkie of land jutting from the southern shores of Massachusetts.

He had to transport an overstuffed backpack, a rolling suitcase with one wonky wheel, his three-racquet tennis bag, and, most cumbersome of all, his twenty-five-pound tabletop stringing machine in another bag. Each leg of the journey he’d taken on foot since that morning—from his mother’s apartment to her Mitsubishi, the car to the Metro-North train, out of Grand Central to hail a taxi to Port Authority, boarding the bus to Providence, Rhode Island, exiting the station to this cab—had required him to shuffle along like a caterpillar. But it was either walk or wait, with.

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