The inside smells of coffee and the stubborn comfort of old linoleum. Reza lifts his head and smiles. The children run at me. Little hands tug at my coat. A girl in a purple hat showsme mittens that are two sizes too big. She is proud of them anyway. I kneel to praise their courage and fold them so her hands don't drown. A boy with a gap-toothed grin demands to know whether Santa can drive in snow. I inform him that Santa operates a fleet. Two mothers push warm bread wrapped in clean dish towels into my hands. They insist that I take an extra loaf "for your old man," which makes me laugh because I cannot decide whether they mean my father or the god who keeps being asked to do too much work in this city.
I take inventory in my head while I hand out oranges from the sack I brought this morning—sizes in coats, the count of dolls with both eyes, how far our gift cards will stretch if I can coax one more vendor with a smile and silence. Reza reads the Wednesday pickup list. I hand Toma lunch and wool gloves. He taps his throat, shakes his head, and smiles softly. That smile, not words, brightens the afternoon. For two hours, I'm exactly who I like to be—useful, invisible, and believed.
When I step out for air, the light is already lowering toward that blue that belongs to Boston in winter and no other city. I tuck my hair into my collar and watch the fog of my breath drift. The street is ordinary, a man scraping a windshield with a credit card, a woman arguing with a Labrador about a puddle, someone singing two streets over where a window is open against cooking smoke. Ordinary until my skin tells me the first true thing it has said all day.
There is a man across the way who is not from here. He wears a black coat of good wool. His haircut looks like he got it from a barber who charges for silence. His stance is military, without the slouch of bad pride. With his hands bare inthe cold, he chooses grip over comfort. He is not looking at me, which is how I know I'm being watched by someone who knows his work. In the bakery window, our gazes meet only as reflections, and his mouth tilts as if the glass has told him enough. He flexes his bare fingers once and strolls up the block, a spectator walking away from a winter show before the last act.
I stand for another half minute to see whether my mind is making a poem out of nothing. When he shifts his weight and the poem becomes a report, I turn back into the center and take the back exit through the hallway that smells of bleach and crayons. In the street behind the building, my driver is exactly where I told him to be. He watches my face and doesn't ask.
"Loop," I say. "Slowly." We take the long rectangle around the block. The man is gone by the time we pass the front again, which only means he remembered to leave before I gave him a number plate. I put my hand on the bread in my lap and feel its warmth bleeding away.
At the estate, evening arranges itself in candles and the silver that appears only when important men require proof that time obeys. I don't change. I take the narrow stair behind the kitchens, the one that threads the house's bones, and descend until the air cools and the lights stop pretending to flatter. I know where he will be at this hour, and urgency carries me there. Stillness lives among steel and maps, in the space between one order and the next.
Dmitri is there, sleeves rolled, speaking with three of his men, the consonants clean and low. He looks up when I step into the doorway. He takes in what I'm wearing and the setof my mouth and dismisses his men with a look. They vanish into the hall without the usual shuffle.
"Valya," he says. He keeps his hands visible. His voice is level.
"Am I being followed?"
"Yes," he says. No preface. No apology. "It is for your safety."
I stand very straight so that I don't sway with the anger that promises more relief than it can deliver. "How many times have you said that?" I ask, then, "Do you trust me?" I'm surprised by how much I want the answer to be the right one and how much it will hurt if it is not.
"More than I trust myself," he says. I believe him because he doesn't blink when he says it, and because his mouth doesn't move the way a mouth moves when it is trying to be pretty.
His eyes are ice gray, ringed darker, winter still until they land on me. Then the surface loosens, thin ice to quick water. Heat slips into my veins as if a match has been struck under the skin. I slow my breathing and bank the flare like coals under ash.
"Don't make me a ghost in my own life," I say. It is the only concession I will make tonight.
"I will not," he says. "I'm trying to make you visible only to the eyes that matter."
I leave before I say something I will regret, because my tongue is quick and my dignity deserves better than a speech given to the wrong audience. I climb the long staircase to my room, where the brass knob keeps a trace of heat and the walls hold the ghosts of winter mornings. Thehouse hushes around me. I take off my coat and hang it with more precision than necessary. I unpin my hair and shake my head. This small pocket of stillness should settle me. It doesn't.
I open the dressing-table drawer for the comb I usually forget to put back, and my fingers meet paper where there should be none. Not the little square of cream I hid under the prayer book. Not a receipt. Not the note from Dmitri, which I still have not decided how to answer. A letter, old cream turned almost ivory, folded in thirds the way he used to fold things to make them feel like secrets.
Aleksandr's hand is so sure of itself that it borders on parody. The same generous loops. The same straight, decisive lines. The same habit of pressing too hard on the downstrokes so the ink darkens like a bruise. I don't have to open it to know it is the one he left in my coat pocket the winter we thought we were better than the houses that built us. I kept it for a while after he left because people who lose faith keep relics even when they know better. Then one day, I hid it so it could not keep staging the past. Bottom of a jewelry box. Back of a closet. Another map. Not here. I did not put it in this drawer.
My heart does a small, ugly thing, the kind of lurch that happens when the floor remembers it is stairs and not a plane. I sit down hard on the rug because my knees have decided they would prefer not to participate.
"He was in my room?" I say it to no one, and the room hears it like a bell that cannot be unrung.
Footsteps in the hall, quick and controlled. A knock that is not a question. The door opens. Dmitri steps in, eyes findingmine on the first breath and then dropping to what I'm holding because he reads rooms to survive. His coat is unbuttoned. He has frost in his hair. The holster sits against his ribs, unashamed of itself.
I'm on the floor with an old letter in my hands and ash still under my nails from the way I chose to start my morning. I hold the paper up so he can see what I shouldn't be holding. My voice is steady because I have learned how to make it so, even when my bones are not. I give him the only sentence that matters.
"He was in my room."
15
DMITRI
The door gives under my hand because vows have a way of teaching wood our names. She is on the floor, back against the bed, legs folded under, hair loose like a pennant after a storm. Charcoal shadows the crescents of her nails, proof of a fire no sink has yet washed away. My gaze narrows. The room sharpens around the letter she holds between two fingers. Her face is set too carefully. The eyes are the only disobedience, bright, wet at the rim, furious in a way she hides from the mirror and doesn't bother to hide from me.
She lifts the paper so I can see what I should never see here. Her voice is level because she has trained it that way. The steadiness hurts more than any cry.
"He was in my room."
The words strike like incense on live coal in a censer. I see the red thread, the crowns sleeping in velvet, the priest's old cadence. My heart lurches as I fully realize that the promiseI spoke is not a contract but a sacrament—to guard her breath, her bed, her secrets, the altar of her life. Anything that enters unbidden profanes us both. My heartbeat drums behind my ear, a slow, relentless hammer. I press my thumb to the iron of my cross and make it kneel. Rage is noise, and vows are order. The prayer grips me before the rage does.
