Except he already does. He already does, he's already met her, he helped her with long division and she's waiting for him to come back, and if he knows my real name then he knows enough to know everything else, and the thing I am trying very hard not to let happen in my chest is happening anyway, that specific cold expansion of fear that I haven't felt in three years, that I thought I'd left far enough behind.
"Alex," Evie says.
I look up.
She and Mr. Roberts are both looking at me. I've missed something. "Sorry," I say. "What?"
"Mr. Roberts asked if you wanted more pasta," she says, with her eyes doing the thing where she's asking a different question than her mouth is.
"No, thank you," I say. "I'm good."
She holds my eyes for one beat longer than necessary. Then she goes back to her dinner, and I go back to mine, and Mr. Roberts resumes the story, and nobody says anything else about it.
Mr. Roberts leaves at eight-thirty, the way he always does on school nights, with his container of leftover soup and his warm, unhurried goodbye and his hand briefly on the top of Evie's head before he goes. I lock both locks behind him and listen to his footsteps move down the hall, and I stand at the door for a moment with my forehead almost against the wood.
Across the hall. 4D.
I don't look at the peephole.
"Bath," I call, and go to do the dishes.
Evie comes out of the bathroom in her pajamas with her hair damp and her face scrubbed clean, and she looks young enough that it physically hurts to look at her sometimes — the gap between the face she puts on and the one underneath it, the one that belongs to an twelve-year-old who should be worried about homework and friends and which book to read next, not about running and locks and men who leave notes outside doors.
She climbs into bed, and I sit on the edge of it the way I always do, the ritual of it, these specific few minutes at the end of the day that belong only to us.
"You're worried about something," she says.
"I'm always worried about something."
"More than usual," she says. "Since the other night."
Since the other night. Since the club, she means, though she doesn't know about the club, and she connects it to the feeling in the apartment without knowing the specifics, because she has been reading me for three years, and she is very good at it. "I'm okay," I say.
"Alex."
"I promise I'm okay," I say. "I'm handling it."
She looks at me with those old eyes in her young face. "Is it like before?" she asks. "Like when we had to—" She stops. "Like before."
"No," I say, and I mean it, and I also don't fully mean it, and she hears both. "It's different."
She's quiet for a moment. "I don't want to move again," she says. Not an outburst like yesterday, just a fact stated quietly, which is somehow more weighty than the outburst.
"I know." I smooth her hair back. "I don't either."
"You promised."
"I know I promised." I look at her face — this face I would set myself on fire for, this kid who packed a bag and kept it under her mattress for fourteen nights and walked through a back door in the dark without making a sound. "I'm keeping it."
She considers me. "The man who came to help with math," she says carefully. "He was the friend, wasn't he. The real one."
I go very still. "What makes you say that?"
"Because you wouldn't be looking at the door like that if he was just a mistake," she says. "And because he knew things about the math that most people don't know, and he wasn't surprised about anything, which is what people who know a lot about a lot of things look like." She pulls her covers up. "And because you're wearing the same face you wear when something is complicated."
I look at my hands for a moment. This child. This extraordinary, perceptive, terrifying child.
"He's complicated," I say. Which is the truest thing I've said all evening.
