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Compass Rose Alley.”
    They were called trap streets for a reason, Joss thought. You couldn’t find them anywhere in Philly—not the real Philly, at least. They existed only on maps produced by Brand O’Malley, and they were put there to catch the plagiarist mapmakers of the world, who found it easier to copy someone else’s maps than survey their own.
    â€œCall our attorneys,” Joss said.
    Di held up a hand. “You can’t afford an attorney—unless it’s a pro bono one.”
    Joss sucked her lip and gave her friend a beseeching look.
    Di rolled her eyes. “I’ll talk to David.” David, her husband, was a lawyer.
    Rogan’s admin stuck her head in the door. “Mr. Reynolds will be ready for you exactly at five.”
    If only I’m ready for him
, Joss thought. She gave Di a look.
    â€œI’m close. I’ll have it by the time we’re up there.”
    Joss grabbed Luke, the baby, and Todd-ler. Di tucked the report under her arm and kept her fingers running furiously over the calculator. Peter trailed behind, protecting the rear from pirates and Sith lords. If Joss couldn’t make payroll, she’d have to lay people off. Di had been the first to go six months earlier, raising her hand to save the jobs of others. Now Joss paid for Di’s time by the hour and used her only when she could afford to. Joss remembered a time when the world had seemed effortless to her. She’d lift a finger and a maid or driver or chef would rush to do her bidding. Now she worked ten-hour days, six-day weeks, to keep the company afloat. Had the world really been that easy, or wasthat just the sentimental nostalgia that all people had about their childhoods?
    They reached the elevator, and Joss put down the car seat so she could lift Peter high enough to press the Up button.
    She prayed Rogan would be amenable. He’d been looking only to buy her father’s company, Brand Industries, and the name of her mother’s—Brand O’Malley, the most famous name in maps—for use on his GPS devices, but he was a great guy and he’d understood Joss’s desire to keep her twenty-three-person business, her only inheritance from her mother, running and under her control.
    What Rogan paid for Brand Industries, though more than he should have, would still barely cover the debt her father had run up before his death three months earlier, so Joss would see no money from that, nor from his personal fortune, which he had thrown into his failing company’s coffers in an attempt to save face among his peers in the business world. And her mother’s much smaller company, which had been more practically run while her mother was alive but neglected under her father’s subsequent guardianship, had spent the last few years teetering on the edge of insolvency.
    Joss felt like her life since her mother’s death, not long after Joss’s eighth birthday, had been laid out strictly to ensure she’d be able to assume control of the mapmaking company when she was old enough. Despite being a lover of literature, she’d applied to and gotten into a math and science high school so she could study geography. In college, she’d pursued a dual major of business and geography while she worked full-time at Brand O’Malley,learning the ropes from the very able managers there. At twenty, even before she’d graduated, she’d accepted in practice what she’d already had in theory—the top executive role—and for the past three years, as the sales of paper maps dropped like a lead printing press, she’d been doing everything she could to keep these fine, hardworking people—and herself—employed.
    The memories of yachts, stretch limos and happy times over salmon
en croûte
at midnight were long gone, having followed her mother, the family money and, finally, her father out of her life. And while losing the wealth had