I leaned in. My voice low at her ear.
"Let me get it."
"No."
I blinked. She did not soften. She did not turn her head. She kept her eyes on the phone.
"I saved for this. Let me have it. Let me have the moment where I got it for myself."
I stopped.
I understood her faster than I had understood most things in my life. She did not want a man with a black card to clip her wings on the way out the door. She wanted the small clean version of the moment she had been promising herself, the one where she walked in with her own money and walked out with her own thing, and she wanted to give that to herself, and I had almost taken it from her without knowing I was doing it.
I put my wallet back inside my jacket. I put my hand at the small of her back. I walked behind her to the counter as her not-shadow. She handed her card to the boy at the register and he ran it. She signed the screen with the side of her thumb. When he slid the bag across the counter she smiled wider than I had seen her smile yet. I took the bag before she could reach for it. I did not ask. She did not stop me.
We walked out into the atrium. The light was the light she had told me about.
She kept turning the box over in her hands inside the bag as we walked, the way a child checks a thing she has been given to make sure the thing has not gone away. I bought her a coffee from the kiosk by the fountain. She drank half of it and handed me the cup. I drank the rest because she had given it to me. She got the new phone out of the box at a bench by the railing and powered it on and held it close to her chest while it set itself up, and I watched her watch the screen come alive, and the small line at the corner of her mouth came back.
She started taking pictures of me.
She did it sideways. She did it when she thought I was reading a sign. She did it when I was looking at the directory and pretending to be looking at the directory. I pretended not tonotice. I noticed every one of them. I would notice every one of them for the rest of my life if she kept taking them.
We turned the corner near the atrium.
I heard my name in a voice I had not heard in a few weeks.
"Daniil!"
She was on us before I had time to decide what to do about her. Small. Dark hair pulled back. The same blush at the top of her cheekbones she had always had. The same sharp eyes that had been sharp at the dinner table the first time Mikhail brought her home. A canvas bag over her shoulder with a small wooden spoon sticking up out of the top, the kind Yelena Whitfield sold from Whitfield Ramen in Brooklyn, the kind I would know from across a room.
I went to introduce them the way a man introduces two women at a mall when one of them is his and the other one is his brother's wife.
"Chloe Kim. Sienna Sorokin. My brother Mikhail's wife."
Sienna's face did the small fast thing it did when she heard a Korean surname. She did not check with me. She did not check with Chloe. She pulled Chloe into a hug before either of them was ready for it, held her there a beat, then pulled back and held her by both shoulders and looked at her for a beat longer than I was comfortable with.
"Look at you. You are beautiful."
I put my hand at Sienna's shoulder and eased her back half a step.
"That is my girl you are complimenting."
Sienna's eyes sparked.
"Since when do you say that out loud, Daniil? I did not know you could be possessive."
Chloe laughed. Out loud. The first time she had laughed at me out loud in public. I took it the way a man takes a punch he has been waiting for.
"Leave us alone, Sienna."
"I cannot do that. Mikhail is at Krov until late. I am alone and I am bored and I am attaching myself to your woman."
She linked her arm through Chloe's. Chloe let her. I moved a half-step to break it up, and Chloe shot me a look over her shoulder that stopped me where I stood.
"Behave, Daniil."
Sienna stuck her tongue out at me from over Chloe's shoulder. I had not been mocked by Sienna in a year and a half. It landed the way it used to land. I let my hand fall back to my side.
