Her friends called her the Keeper. Not to her face, of course. To her face, they just laughed and said, “How do you do that?”

The room didn’t go silent. Music still thumped. Ice still clinked. But Amelia felt the floor drop away. Because he was right. She had become a vault with nothing of her own inside—just the echoes of everyone else.

But one evening, at a party in a low-lit Brooklyn apartment, a man with kind eyes and a forgettable name said to her, “You never really tell us anything about yourself, do you, Amelia?”