There’s a pause.
Then, “On it.”
By 3 AM, the feed is live.
In an attempt to leash myself, I’m hunkered down in Leonid’s study. Three coffees deep, I stare at my wife asleep in my bed without me. I fucking hate the way my most lingering thought is about how fucking beautiful she is.
“Have I mentioned how fucked up this is?” Leonid asks from the doorway. I didn’t hear him come in.
“Several times.”
I don’t look away from the screen.
I’ve no interest in confronting the concern lurking in the eyes we both inherited. “You really think she’d run, man?” It’s more of a sigh than a question.
“She’s transferring money. A few weeks ago, Driscoll showed up at the café, looking sober, and asked her to sell ourfamily out and run away with the money from it. Last week, Nadya got shot at. Since then, she hasn’t let me touch her for more than a few minutes without running off.” I list the facts, one after another, because I’ve been going over them and over them in my head. “What does it look like?”
“I don’t know,” he admits after a heavy pause. “But I know that woman loves you,bratan.I know that I don’t believe she’d leave you.”
Now, I look over at Leonid. It’s rare to see my smartass of a brother looking so earnest. But he’s blinded, too. He likes Janella. They all do.
It makes this easier and difficult.
With a harsh breath, I scrub my hands over my face. “Guess we’ll find out one way or another.”
***
The days meld together.
Day after day, I watch her go through the motions at work. I feel my chest constrict every time she throws her head back and laughs—with Carmen and Jin, with her customers—like nothing is wrong. I watch the careful way she checks the register after every shift, as if the bills might have disappeared over the course of the day.
To look at her? No, she doesn’t look like she’s planning to run.
When she comes home at night, she looks hollowed out. Her shoulders are hunched in on themselves, as if fatigued from carrying the weight of the fucking world.
Weight that she doesn’t share with me. Maybe the weight of all her secrets, as if we never decided not to keep any from one another.
Every day, betrayal courses through me, acidic.
When I break and go home for the night, sick of Leonid’s fucking dogs slobbering over me, she doesn’t come to me. She stays sealed away in her own room.
The distance between us isn’t one crossing the hallway could fix.
It kills me that she doesn’t even try.
***
It’s a week into surveillance that the wait ends. One moment, I’m reviewing footage from the night before. Next, the feed is parsing through the mid-afternoon rush. Frame by frame, footage captures Cillian Driscoll stumbling into The Great Escape.
In my head, I’d been envisioning a taller, polished version of him. The reality is worse than the last time I laid eyes on him, the night I bought Janella out from under him and swept her away to my world.
His clothes are a disaster, wrinkled and stained. The man in them is a worse mess. Even through the pixelated stream, I don’t miss the glassy, manic gleam in his eyes as they search for her.
All activity in the café comes to a simultaneous standstill as Driscoll shouts her name.
The look on Janella’s face is not joyous. There is no relief. The closer she moves into the camera’s view, the clearer it is.
“Look!” Driscoll hollers, throwing his hands up in the air as if to rejoice. “It’s my favorite daughter!”
