Chapter 1 — 3:07 AM

3:07 AMNovember. Chicago.The diner was called Manny's, and it had no business being open at three in the morning.The sign out front was missing the apostrophe — just MANNYS in sun-bleached red letters — and the neon OPEN light in the window had a flicker in it that made it look like it was considering closing. The coffee was bad. Not terrible, not undrinkable, but the specific kind of mediocre that came from a machine that had been making the same coffee since 1987 and had stopped trying.Inaaya Sharma knew all of this because she had been coming here for six weeks, every night she couldn't sleep, which was most nights.She sat at the counter — not a booth, she'd learned early that booths made her feel like she was waiting for someone — with both hands around a mug and her jacket still on because Manny's heating system ran on optimism rather than functional radiators. The cook, a man named Lou who she had never heard speak more than four words in a row, was doing something to a grill in the back that involved rhythmic scraping. The only other staff was a college-aged girl named Dana who had long since given up pretending to do sidework and was watching something on her phone behind the counter.Three in the morning on a Tuesday in November.Everyone at Manny's at this hour was here because the alternative — wherever home was — was worse.Inaaya had determined this in her first week. The two men at the far booth who came every Friday and played chess using a magnetic travel board, never talking except to call moves. The older woman who always ordered tea and never drank it, just held the cup, reading the same paperback she'd been reading for as long as Inaaya had been coming here. The man in the delivery jacket who came in at 2:30 AM sharp, ordered pancakes, ate with the efficiency of someone refueling rather than eating, and left.She was part of the 3 AM ecology of this place now. A regular.She would have found this more depressing if she'd had the energy for depression. Currently she was running on something that was technically caffeine and practically just the wish for caffeine, and she was doing what she'd been doing for six weeks: sitting very still in a lit place and waiting for something inside her to settle enough that sleep became possible.It usually happened around four. Sometimes four-thirty. Then she'd walk home through the empty streets and sleep for three hours and wake up and go to work at the hospital and do all of it again.She was a resident. Third year. Internal medicine. Sleep deprivation was not unusual in her life, but this was a different kind — not the clean exhaustion of a long shift but the specific depletion of someone whose brain had forgotten how to stop.The door opened at 3:07.She didn't look up, which was her default. The ecology of Manny's ran on the courtesy of not looking up.She heard the stool two down from her scrape against the floor. She felt, without looking, the specific presence of a person settling onto it — not the heavy settling of someone who had been on their feet for hours, not the careful settling of someone in physical pain. Something else. The settling of someone very tired in a way that wasn't physical.She recognized that. She was that."Coffee," he said to Dana. Not rude, not exactly polite. Flat. The voice of someone who had used all their social energy somewhere else and had nothing left for transactions.Dana, without looking up from her phone: "Regular or dark roast?"A pause. "Which is worse?""Regular.""Regular, then."