The Inheritance of Dust

The air inside Chen’s Imports tasted of damp newsprint and dried ginseng—a scent that had clung to Leo Chen’s clothes since childhood. He didn’t stop to breathe it in. He moved directly to the back office, his Italian loafers clicking sharply against the uneven floorboards, a rhythmic, clinical intrusion into the shop’s incense-choked silence. He wanted this over by noon. A quick appraisal, a call to the liquidators, and he could be back in his glass-walled office in the city, far from the suffocating intimacy of a neighborhood that still remembe

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