The alley smells like cabbage. I know the trick of the hinge plate on the service door because I have been the first person into this kitchen more mornings than not for months. The plate lifts with a butter knife and the latch gives with a soft, embarrassed click. I slip inside and feel that quiet that comes when a place that is usually busy has been silenced on purpose. The heat is off. Metal carries cold like gossip. The ghost of last night’s onion hangs in the air.
“Grab your knives and anything you can’t live without,” I tell the staff, practical because panic is like too much salt in a sauce,easy to add, hard to fix. “We’ll regroup at George’s, he’ll let us sit in the back if we buy enough coffee.”
They scatter, a flock with purpose, and I go straight to the office with its glass door and its ridiculous poster that saysteamwork makes the dream workas if the dream had a punch clock. The safe is open, the petty cash tin is empty, and the chair is askew. There’s a stack of invoices on the desk that should be filed by date but are not, so the wrongness hums. I thumb through the top ones. They are ordinary—bread, produce, a plumber who never shows up on time—until the third page, a delivery slip stamped with the name of a distribution company I have never seen and an address printed below that makes my pulse change its stride.Eastie Storage, Pier 6, Bay Three.
I do not know that address, and also I know it the way you know the corner you are not supposed to turn down alone. I slip the paper into my coat sleeve without knowing I have decided anything. It feels like a coin pressed into my palm by someone who did not want to be seen paying me.
Outside, Siobhan cries that sharp, angry cry kind cooks have when they are being stolen from, and Oscar is already calling a regular with a lawyer brother. I give them the speech you give when you are the eldest daughter of a city and a kitchen and a dream that refuses to bend. We will be fine, and I will call you, and do not let anyone tell you that you are less than because a piece of paper says so. I tuck my knife roll under my arm and pretend the feeling in my legs is normal.
George’s Diner is three blocks away and always smells like bacon and the grease of a thousand breakfasts that made construction workers into heroes. We huddle in the back beneath a framed Sox jersey. I order pancakes for the table because sadness eats flapjacks and because nowhere on earth cares if you cry over maple syrup.
“Call him,” Siobhan says, glancing at my face like a news anchor who is better at reading a teleprompter than a room. “Call Declan if you’re seeing him. He knows things. Rich people always know things.”
“Rich people do not know about city inspectors who tape notices crookedly,” I say, which is not exactly untrue, and fork a piece of pancake I cannot taste. “Go home. Rest. I’ll text when I know anything.”
I do not call him. I walk east as the day unspools and the light turns the color of a dish towel that has been washed too many times, down to the water where the air has the mineral sting I always mistake for honesty. The address pulls me like it has a string. I let myself be pulled. Boston in winter is a series of small betrayals—black ice where you thought there was sidewalk, a wind that turns the corner with a knife in its mouth—and the piers are the worst of it, all open throat and no apology.
Pier 6 is a mouth of iron and old stories. The storage bays are long and low and numbered like they belong to a disreputable school, the kind where boys learn to steal cars and then lawyer their way out of it ten years later. Bay Three is half open, a mouth that forgot to close after dinner. I stand for a long breath and listen. Metal settling, a gull with the voice of a heavy smoker, a distant engine. No human sound.
Inside, the light is cold and unkind and the smell is steel, wet wood, oil, and something copper that gets into the back of my throat. Pallets of boxed dry goods stand to one side, neat as a prayer. The other half of the space is empty enough to make me feel like I have stepped into a photograph.
Then I hear it, not words at first, only the way a voice holds the air when it has nothing left to bargain with. I move toward the sound because apparently, my survival instinct took the morning off. The next bay over is separated by a wall that doesnot reach the ceiling. There is a gap where sound can tumble over, and I find the crack in the wall where sight follows.
Wallace is on his knees in a ring of light, his shirt untucked and dark at the collar as if someone pressed their fingers into it and did not wipe their hand. His hair is falling into his eyes and his face is the gray of overworked dough. He tries to talk like he still has something to sell.
“I can make it right,” he says. “I have a shipment coming in Friday, I can cover everything, I can?—”
“No,” Declan says, and his voice is the low, even sound he uses when he tells a crowded room to sit down and they do. He is sleeves to the elbow, forearms mapped with sinew and old stories, the line of his shoulders straight as a mast. The gun in his hand looks like it belongs there because that is how hands work. They learn what they are given. He is not angry. He is not anything I can name.
“You took money from them, you moved our boys off the south pier so they could bring their parcels in clean, you used a restaurant I protected to wash what isn’t ours, and you did it with my name in your mouth,” he says. “I do not forgive theft dressed as debt. I do not forgive greed that endangers my people.”
Wallace starts to say the word family, and I flinch because I know the way that word sounds when it is a plea, and Declan must too because his mouth tightens once.
“Look at me,” he says, and Wallace lifts his eyes and looks because a man like Declan carries gravity in his voice, and the small pistol rises in his hand the way a sentence rises to its period, and I cannot breathe because my body knows what the next breath will bring and does not know what to do with it. The shot is not loud in the way the movies insist. It is quick and hard and then everywhere, it echoes in my teeth and the smell ofpowder is a metal flower opening fast. Wallace falls like a cord was cut.
The silence after is not silence. It is breath staggered by shock and the ring in my ears and the steady beat of the harbor against pilings that has always sounded like a pulse if you let yourself be quiet enough to hear it. Declan lowers his arm and exhales and I think for a stupid half second that he will put the gun in his pocket and button his cuffs and walk away like he just replaced a light bulb in his kitchen and then he turns toward the wall where I am not breathing and sees me.
He doesn’t startle. Of course he doesn’t. He looks like a man who has found something he set down in a careful place and hoped he would not find there. Our eyes hook. Every minute since the gala folds into the room.
“Aoife,” he says, and there is apology in it and command and something that feels like grief from a distance.
I step back from the crack in the wall because the floor has forgotten its job and my face has forgotten how to be a face. I do not run at first. I walk with my knife roll under my arm like I am leaving my shift five minutes early, like I have to catch a bus and don’t want to wait for the next one, like the sound in my ears is a kettle and not a shot. Then I am in the open where the cold finds my lungs and the wind cuts across the pier with its clean salt knife, and I run.
I did not know I could run like this. My shoes are not for it and my coat is wrong but my body has made its own decisions. My feet slap the wet boards. The smear of the city is ahead. The gulls look surprised. I do not look back. The world narrows to the space between my ribs where air is suddenly currency and the slap of my heels and the fact that I can taste pennies and the way my hands, traitors, are steady on the knife roll because training is a god.
“Aoife,” he calls once, far behind, because he will not shout like a boy who chases a girl who will not be caught. I ignore the name like I have thrown it into the harbor and the tide has taken a liking to it. I turn left where the pier meets the cracked asphalt and keep going because motion is the only thing that makes sense.
I hit a patch of thin ice where the puddle thought it could be solid and lose a step. The roll slides from under my arm. I grab it and swear a word my grandmother would applaud. A man with a hand truck glances up, sees enough to understand nothing, looks away, decides he is part of another story. The chain-link fence around the far lot, the one with the rusty padlock and the sign that says absolutely no trespassing like a bored uncle, looms. There is a gap where the fence meets the post, just enough for a person smaller than her panic to slip through. I am not smaller. I try anyway.
His hand closes around my wrist, warm through the wool, and the thing in my chest that holds ribs in their polite arrangement goes white and then hot. He doesn’t yank. He holds. Enough pressure to say he has me, not enough to hurt.
“Let me go,” I say, and the sound of my voice makes me want to throw up. “Declan, let me go.”
“Come with me,” he says, a calmness that is a lie and also not. “Not here. Not with the water at your back and the world looking.”
I twist. He uses the hold to draw me in, not hard, controlled like a tango we did not rehearse. My shoulder hits his chest. I smell powder and salt and the ghost of the cocoa we made three months ago on a night when I thought the world could be both cruel and kind if we brokered the agreement. My breath is a saw.
“Do not,” I say, and I am not sure what verb I am forbidding. Do not lie. Do not touch. Do not make me a person who can watch a man die and then go home and zest an orange. Do not beexactly who you are in front of me when the only way I knew how to love you was to pretend we were both someone else.
