The Circulation Desk

The thing about the city at 4 a.m. was that it belonged to a different population entirely. Chapter 2.

Cam had learned this during the months she'd worked the overnight shift at the bakery, years before the bakery closed and she'd found herself in the unlikely position of being thirty-four and unemployed in a city she'd lived in for a decade without, she now understood, ever having looked at closely. The overnight population was older, quieter, more deliberate. It moved through the empty streets as if the streets existed for them specifically, as if the daytime city were the temporary condition and this—the delivery trucks, the small clusters of people walking with purpose in the wrong direction, the foxes that emerged from wherever they hid during daylight—were the real thing.

She found the note on a Tuesday in March, tucked under the wiper of her bicycle, which she had locked to the same post outside the public library for eleven years. It was handwritten on the back of a receipt, in a small, unhurried script that suggested a person who was comfortable…