The jeep rolled past smokestacks, crossed railroad tracks at a crawl, and coasted into a warehouse parking lot, tires crackling on searing blacktop. The driver-side window slid down. A weathered-faced man with thinning black hair tied back into a knot glanced out to check if the trailer was clear of the road. Brakes screeched, the engine stalled, the jeep juddered to a stop.

As he thumbed his new address into the phone’s GPS, he heard gunshots echoing from the warehouse. Or were they firecrackers? Not wanting to find out which, he leaned forward to restart the engine when a clang like a cymbal rang out and the passenger-side window exploded, tiny shards of glass striking the side of his face, the bullet grazing his head. “Fuck!”

The next thing he knew, he was crouching on baking asphalt, his face streaked with blood, his life upended by an act so random it seemed calculated. It was as though the finger on the trigger was waiting for him to appear at that precise moment, in that peculiar place, the bullet on a trajectory toward him before it had even been shot.

It was an event that would catapult him into a world of powerful kinships, bonding him by sheer chance to a woman at the center of that world, forcing him to re-imagine his ill-fated life muddling through not-so-academic affairs.