“We are not the same.” I study her for a moment too long, long enough to make her shift. “You sell what you see. I protect it.”
Her gaze slips past me toward the mouth of the alley. Her hand disappears into her coat pocket and stays there too long for comfort. I step in, catch her wrist, and press it to the brick with two fingers and an inch of motion. It is a quiet hold. No one sees it. She gasps once, then steadies, trained not to let the sound mean anything.
“No knives in pockets tonight,” I say. “Not while I’m standing here. Test me and you will learn how quickly I stop you.”
She smiles again. It is a shadow of the first. “Ask what you want to ask.”
“You tell them what you saw,” I say. “Tell them you mistook kindness for weakness. Tell them the boy is not a handle. Tell them I was in your hall today while you made your call and that I will stand on both doors. Use that tone you like, the one that says you are safe while your mind doubts if you are.”
“I will tell them something else,” she says, voice sweet. “I will tell them the pageant has two doors that stick and a side gate that does not. The choir children arrive in clusters. I will tell them your sheriff looks at the wrong corner when the bell rings, and you don’t know which hand will knock on the back door first.”
“You believe you will be there to watch it,” I say. “You will not.”
“Do you plan to stop me here?” she asks. The smile edges back. “My men will find me.”
I lean closer. She can smell soap and winter on me. I smell old oil and adhesive on her. I speak in a voice that stays in the alley and nowhere else.
“Listen to me,” I say. “Step by step. You will walk to your car. Drive to your room. Pack in silence. You will leave what you cannot carry. Do not come back to the block that holds the bakery. I see you there again, and your news goes to a different calendar. One with no more days.”
Her lips part. I feel the shift in her wrist, the tiny drop of fight. I let go. She rubs at the skin once. Pride tells her not to. Flesh insists. In the tug-of-war, pride loses.
“You won’t hit me,” she says, her eyes blazing. “Men like you don’t hit women. It’s your code.” The taunt is a probe, not a statement.
“I do not need to hit you,” I say. “I need you to understand.”
I take the phone from her pocket with the same motion that set her wrist to the brick. She tries to step and finds my heel where it needs to be. She is fast. I am faster. The screen of her phone wakes, then dies under my thumb. The tray slides. SIM and micro cards snap between my finger and thumb and scatter to the ice like dark salt that will never melt. I place the phone back into her pocket. Now her hand shakes.
“You keep your stories in rooms,” I say. “I empty them in alleys.”
The smile is gone now. She looks past me, then forces her eyes to return to mine. I see calculation. She breaks the moment into parts, testing each one for weakness. And something else is there that is not calculation. It is the crackin a trained face when it meets a fact. It is small. It is enough.
“Give Benedetti something true,” I say. “He is not the only one who knows how a pageant moves or who can make a town stand when he wills and then turn. Tell him I remembered your face before you changed it, and I will be there when his clock stops.”
She holds my stare for a count that wants to be longer. Then she lifts her chin and tries one more time.
“You can’t protect them all,” she says. “You can’t be in the bakery and at the church and on the road at once.”
“I do not need to be three men,” I say. “I need to be the right one at the right door.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it. I step back to give her room to make her choice. She slides sideways and reaches her car by trace rather than stride. I watch her hands when she starts the engine.
She backs out slowly, then glides into Main like a fish slipping back into deep waters. I wait until the taillights fade, count to five, then walk to my car. I do a slow roll through town to break any anxious rhythm before arriving at the bakery through the back alley. The light above the back step is new, my own. It looks like a fixture, but it listens for feet.
Heat and spice meet me in the short hall. The panel that fills the front pane is still in place. The room is soft in the evening. I step to the kitchen and stop at the scene that holds me like a hand.
Lila sits on a stool with Marco perched on her lap, a mixing bowl balanced against her hip. Flour dusts both of them, a fine pale scatter on her sweater and his hair. The boy leans forward with a wooden spoon and scrapes the last ribbon of gingerbread from the side of the bowl. He pulls the spoon free, grins, and offers it up like a trophy. Lila catches it with two fingers and laughs without sound, the kind she gives him when she wants to keep the room to themselves.
It is an ordinary picture. It is not ordinary for me. I wait at its periphery because if I walk too fast, it will ripple and break. Marco sees me first. He raises the spoon like a salute.
“Cookie commander,” he announces, solemn. “We made troops.”
“Good,” I say. My voice does not come easy for a moment.
“They will have hats,” he says. “Like mine.”
“We will give them hats,” Lila says, and her eyes meet mine. For a second, everything in her face is open. Then the shield returns. The guarded look is policy. It is the right call.
“You were gone longer than five minutes,” she says. She brushes flour from Marco’s shoulder and reaches for the tray. “I decided not to ask where.”
