"Thank you for respecting my no."
I set my chopsticks down.
"Trust me. I want to. When we do, I want you wanting it too."
The color came up under her cheekbones in two soft patches. She pressed the back of her hand to the side of her face the way she had at the compound when Lily had teased her about looking at me too long.
"Stop talking like that."
I gave her the two notes again. Low. Mine and Mikhail’s. She caught the sound in her shoulders and let it land.
She set her chopsticks down across the rim of her bowl. She lined them up with her thumb. She looked at me the way a person looks at a door they are about to open.
"How did you know where I work?"
I did not answer at once. I set my own chopsticks down and I put my hands flat on the small table on either side of my bowl. I let the joke fall off my face. I looked at her full.
"We did not meet the other night."
Her eyes did not move.
"I saw you three months back at a coffee shop on Mott. You were a penny short for an iced coffee. You laughed at yourself instead of going red. The boy behind the counter waved you off and you put the dollar in his tip jar two days later. I watched you do that too. I started looking for you after that. It is the thing I do for a living. I am good at it."
She did not move her hand off the side of her glass.
"I know where you live. I know where you work. I know the names of the boys you put to bed. I know what time you call your grandmother at the end of every week, and I know what her voice sounds like through your door when you do. I know what your shampoo costs."
I stopped there. I held her eyes.
"Are you afraid?"
She did not look down. She did not pull the glass closer. She did not move at all for the length of one slow breath. Then herthumb moved on the side of the glass and made a small clean track through the condensation.
"It should scare me..."
She took the smallest breath.
"It doesn’t. I don’t know why."
I smiled. Not the smile I had worn on the sidewalk. Not the one I had worn in the car. The smaller one. The one my mother used to catch on my face when she found me reading at the window as a boy, the one I had not given away in a long time.
Ptichka. You are not running. You should be running. You will not, and I will not let you, and you are going to find that out about both of us soon.
4
CHLOE
The brownstone door clicked behind me and the stoop took on the slope of every long shift I had ever worked. My braid had given up around bath time. A loose ribbon of hair kept finding the corner of my mouth. I left it there. I rolled my left shoulder out as I came down the four stone steps, slow, because Theo had decided on the last block from the park that his legs had used up all their walking and the only solution was to be carried the rest of the way. Owen had walked himself like a tiny diplomat, hand in mine, narrating the bushes.
Five blocks. Forty-three pounds of small boy. My deltoid is going to write me a strongly worded letter in the morning.
I cleared the last step and lifted my eyes and the smile got there before the rest of me. He was at the curb where he had been a month of nights, leaning against the passenger side of the Maybach with his hands in the pockets of a coat darker than the night around him. The long line of him said nothing and offered nothing and waited. The streetlamp put a soft outline along his shoulder. He was not on his phone. He was not pacing. He had taught his body how to be still in a way that did not look likepatience exactly, more like a decision he had finished making about an hour ago.
This is the part that should not work. A man in a coat that costs more than my rent, parked outside the brownstone of two boys I babysit, every night for a month. This should make my throat tight. It does not. It loosens something. The unsurprise is the surprise.
He pushed off the car with one shoulder when I was halfway across the sidewalk.
"How was your day?" he said.
