I don't remember sitting up. The fire is down to a red glow in the stove grate and Wolf is standing beside the bed with his ears up, watching me the way he watches a tree line.
"Did I yell?"
"A little." Her hand is still flat on my chest. She doesn't move it. "You said a name."
I don't ask which one.
"Lie back down," she suggests.
"I'm fine."
"Take direction for once in your stubborn life. Lie back down."
I do so, begrudgingly. The pillow is damp. My heart is going too fast and won't be told otherwise, so I just breathe and let itrun itself out. Caroline settles beside me, on her side, no blanket wall. There hasn't been one for two nights now. Her knee finds my leg under the quilt and stays there. Wolf circles twice and drops back onto our feet with a grunt.
For a while, nobody talks.
Then I do.
"Twenty-one years ago, I got married."
I feel her go still. Careful-still. Like a person who's found a deer in a meadow and doesn't want to spook it.
"Her name was Yelena," I say. "You know that already. You read the back of the photograph."
"I'm sorry I?—"
"Don't be sorry. This is the next installment. I said I'd tell it in my order, and this is how the next part goes." I look at the ceiling. The roof metal ticks in the wind. "She waited tables at a restaurant in Brighton Beach, the one in the photograph. Gervasii did business out of the corner booth a few nights a week. I'd sit with him, and she'd come bring us tea and tell me how ugly I was."
Caroline blushes and laughs at the same time. "Is that supposed to be a meet-cute?"
"She said if I was going to scowl like a gargoyle and scare off all her other customers, I should at least tip better." I can hear her. That's the thing about twenty years of mourning. The memory of her face goes soft around the edges, but the sound stays crystal clear. "I was nineteen. I went back every night for a month, alone, no Gervasii, and kept ordering from everyone else on staff until she'd finally come out to talk to me herself. Eventually, shesat down across from me and said, 'Either ask me out or stop wasting my section.'"
"And she said yes?" asks Caroline.
"Nope. Told me I was too ugly for her to date." I shake my head in the dark. "But she didn't mean it. Six months later, we were married. City hall, just the two of us and Gervasii to witness. She wore that blue dress because it was the only nice one she owned, and I told her I'd be the happiest man on earth if it was the only thing she wore for the rest of her life.
Caroline's hand moves on my chest, slow, back and forth.
"We had a year together," I say. "That December, she drove up to Saratoga Springs to see her aunt. Her aunt was sick, nothing serious, a bad chest cough, but Yelena was the one in her family who showed up for people. She made the drive alone. I was supposed to come, but there was work, and Gervasii needed me. I told her I'd take the next trip."
Her hand stills and her face falls. "Afon, you don't have to if you don't?—"
"Let me get through it." I breathe. "On the way back, on a county road about nine miles out of town, her car left the road. It rolled twice and came down in a field. The police said she died fast. I've never known whether they say that to everyone or if it was actually true."
Caroline doesn't say anything. Her forehead comes to rest against my shoulder. I keep talking, because the deal was that once I start, I don't stop.
"They ruled it black ice and bad luck. Case closed. But there were no skid marks on the asphalt. None. A driver who hits icefights the wheel and you see it on the road. Her road was clean. So I drove up there myself, after, and I walked that shoulder for two days." I gaze up at the ceiling. "The shoulder was frozen mud, and there were tracks chewed into it. Snowmobile tracks. Running along the road, right where her car went off."
Her jaw drops. "Somebody ran her off the road?"
"I don't know exactly. I probably never will. Maybe they fired a shot and scared her off. But the police didn't care about my theories. They said they had other things to do, and they moved on."
"But you didn't."
"No. I didn't." My hand finds the ring without me telling it to, thumb against the bronze, an old habit. "Gervasii and I had just started running the Lastochka. Money was moving and people were noticing. I've spent twenty years wondering if the wrong pair of eyes saw our success and thought they could scare us off and claim it for themselves."
"Did you ever ask Gervasii if he agreed?"
