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Her mouth curved. She leaned into my side, and I let her.

Outside, the morning was cool and bright. She walked with her skirt swishing against my leg, looking up at everything. A stray curl slipped loose from the band and fell across her cheek. I tucked it behind her ear before I knew I had lifted my hand. Her breath caught. I looked straight ahead, and my pulse made a fool of me.

The tailor’s shop sat on a narrow side street, a few doors from the pale stone church. Gold lettering on the glass. A bell above the door. Inside, the air smelled of hot steam and chalk and lavender, and a thin old man looked up from a bolt of grey cloth, pins between his lips.

“Mr Keshishian,” I said.

He studied me over thick glasses. Then he took the pins from his mouth, one at a time.

“The cloth is for a wedding,” I said.

“Then it must be perfect.” He smiled at Zuri, and his eyes crinkled. “Welcome, my dear. Welcome. Come.”

He led her to a stool in front of a blue backdrop and draped a tape measure around her neck, chattering, tutting, turning her this way and that. Zuri threw me a bewildered glance. I gave her nothing. A camera flashed twice.

“Photographs for the portrait,” Keshishian said smoothly. He turned to me and spoke softly in Russian. “Three days.”

“Two.”

He sighed. “For Zero, two.”

Zuri’s head snapped around. “What portrait? Tau.”

I waited until he had gone into the back. Then I crouched in front of her stool, so we were eye to eye.

“You will have a new passport,” I said.

“A what?”

“We are leaving the country.”

The colour left her face. “Leaving. Where? For how long?”

“Across the Atlantic. By ship. Seven days.”

“Seven—” She stared at me. “My aunt. My parents. I thought you said I could call—”

“Tonight. A burner. Thirty seconds.”

“And after that?”

“They will not stop looking, Zuri. Not here. Not for years.” It was the longest speech I had made in days. “I will buy your luggage. Everything you need for the voyage. You will lack nothing.”

She did not answer. Her hands had gone still in her lap. She looked down at the print of her skirt, then at the floor, and I watched the news land inside her, slowly, like a stone sinking through water.

I did not speak. I did not touch her. I let it settle.

When the first tear fell, I stood, drew her up off the stool and held her. She stiffened for one breath. Then she folded against my chest, her face in my shirt, her fingers gripping my lapels. I put one hand on the back of her head and the other around her waist, and rested my chin on her hair.

“I have you,” I said.

Behind the curtain, an old man blew his nose and carefully did not come out.

❦ ❦ ❦

She still looked a little forlorn after lunch. All I could do was hold her hand or offer small pats on her back. I did not know how to comfort someone. But I hated how her bottom lip trembled as she fought back tears.

It stopped and started. There was no rhyme or reason. It came and went like waves of the ocean.