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“He's short six pallets,” Arina says, without turning around.

“I know,” I say.

“You could have mentioned it.”

“Andrei had already noticed.”

Andrei glances back at me with a grin that pulls at the scar. The driver goes to make a phone call.

Six weeks since the funeral. Two since the wedding.

It was small. The courthouse with her sisters and Viktor sitting for her, and surprisingly my sisters and their husbands and a whole load of their kids on mine. Timur stood beside me and held back tears like a hero. Afterward, we went to Tbiliso, and the grandmother closed the restaurant, fed us until midnight, and told me in Georgian that she'd known from the first night.

“So did I,” I’d said. “She just needed a little time to catch up.”

The next morning, Arina took her bouquet to her father's grave.

I waited by the car. I didn't hear what she said to him. When she came back, her eyes were red and her jaw was set, and she got into the passenger seat and said, “I told him I'm still angry with him.”

“Are you?”

“Furious.” She buckled her seatbelt. “But I miss him so much I can't breathe.”

I didn't say anything. I just held her hand the whole drive home, and she let me.

***

The fallout from the yard took about a week to settle, like silt in a river after a storm.

Rusakov said nothing at first. That was its own kind of answer. Then his trucks disappeared from every dock between the Port District and the city center, and Yuri Belov stopped showing his face at the clubs. The word I hear is that he can't hold a cigarette yet.

The rest of Chicago took notice, too.

Three of Volkov's old crew came to the warehouse, caps in their hands, asking whether there was still work for them. Arina made them wait an hour in the rain before she saw them. Then she hired two and sent the third away, and when I asked her why, she said he hadn't looked at Andrei once the whole time he was standing there.

Half the men who shook hands at Yaroslav's graveside sent wedding gifts. Expensive ones. Crystal and silver and a painting by somebody whose name made Zhenya choke on her tea.

Arina sent every single one of them a handwritten thank-you note on her father's stationery.

It was the most frightening thing I've ever watched her do.

Then, last Thursday, Rusakov asked for a meeting.

***

He chooses an upscale restaurant on Main. Neutral ground. He's already seated at the back when we arrive, a lean man in his sixties with a silver beard and a beautiful charcoal coat.

A jackal in a nice coat. Yaroslav was never wrong about people.

He stands when we come in. Arina notices.

“Garick.” He holds out his hand to me.

I don't take it. I pull out Arina's chair instead, wait for her to sit, and then take the seat beside her. Half a step back.

Rusakov's hand hangs in the air a moment longer. Then he lowers it, smiles thinly, and sits.

“My congratulations on your marriage,” he says to me.