Page 25 of The Dangerous Dance

"Task me with it," he says. "With keeping her safe and occupied through whatever the next month looks like. Give me something official."

I look at him.

He meets my eyes steadily, and what's in his is not the hostility or the defended distance of the last six months. It is something older than that, something that predates the fracture — my brother asking me for a role. Asking to be given something to protect.

"Done," I say.

He nods. Once. And the quality of the room changes in a way I don't want to name too directly because naming it will put pressure on it and it is still fragile.

"The Italians tomorrow," I say. "I'll brief you after."

"All right."

I leave him with the folder and the south distribution plan and the particular relief of a man who has been given something useful to do with his loyalty, and I walk out into the cold thinking about fractures and how they close. Not quickly. Not completely. But sometimes, in the right conditions, they begin.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. It's the surveillance contact — new footage from outside the Italian shipping offices in lower Manhattan.

She was there this morning.

I stop on the pavement. Look at the notification. The timestamp is nine-forty-seven, which is forty-seven minutes after I was hiding in a dry cleaner on her street and she was walking past me without knowing I was there.

She went straight from her neighborhood to the Italian shipping offices.

She is efficient. I will give her that. I will give her a great many things at this point, none of which I'm prepared to fully account for, and all of which are going to become a problem at a speed I'm no longer confident I can manage.

I put the phone away.

Tomorrow I'll sit across from Marco and tell him what I know, which will be incomplete, and explain the Bayonne hit through the lens of what I can say without saying what I'm not saying.

Tonight I'll go home and open the file and add: moved on Italian target — faster timeline than projected. Adjust accordingly.

And then I'll sit with the window open and the city coming in and try to figure out what adjust accordingly means when the woman I'm supposed to neutralize is also the woman whose existence is becoming the only thing in my day I look forward to.

I'll think about it.

I'll close the laptop.

I'll open it again.

CHAPTER 11

Nadia

The community event is a farmers market that sets up on Saturday mornings in a park three blocks from the apartment, and I go because Dara found it on her second day here and has since decided it is the best thing about New York, which tells you something about Dara's priorities and also about the quality of the market, which is genuinely excellent.

We go every Saturday that circumstances allow. We buy vegetables we cook badly and bread we don't ruin and occasionally something from the honey stall run by a man named Gerald who has very strong opinions about buckwheat varieties and will share them at length if you make eye contact for more than two seconds. It is the most ordinary thing I do in this city, and I have come to rely on it with a fervor that is probably disproportionate to its actual significance but which I think has something to do with the particular value of normalcy when most of what you do is not normal.

Dara is at the honey stall. Gerald has her. She will be there for a minimum of eight minutes and she knows it and accepts it as the cost of the honey, which is worth it.

I'm at the bread table when I feel it.

Not a sound. Not a movement I can identify. Just the weight of being looked at by someone who knows how to look. I've felt it twice before in this city and both times it was the same source, which tells me either my instincts are calibrated correctly or I've developed a specific sensitivity to one particular person's presence that I'm not going to examine right now in a farmers market on a Saturday morning.

I pick up a loaf of sourdough. I read the label with the focus of someone very interested in fermentation times. I say, without looking up: "You're going to need to buy something or the woman running this table is going to ask you to move."

A pause. Then he steps up beside me and picks up a loaf of his own.

"The rye," I tell him. "The sourdough is better but the rye will last longer if you're not going to eat it immediately."