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I’m there at twenty to eight. I park two houses down, so the truck isn’t the first thing anyone sees out the window, and wait.

At quarter to, the yellow door opens and a woman in her sixties steps out onto the porch. Gray hair cropped short. A cardigan with the sleeves pushed up. Arms folded in a way that tells me she’s been doing this job for a long time and has met every kind of man there is.

She looks at me sitting in my truck. I get out, so she can see all of me at once and get it over with.

“You’re here for the fence,” she says. “Evaria said you were big.” Her eyes travel up and stop somewhere around my face. “She undersold it.”

“I get that a lot.”

“I’m sure you do.” She doesn’t unfold her arms. “I’m Bernadette. I run this house. You’ll come in through the side gate, not the front. You’ll stay in the yard unless someone invites you inside. If any of the women here want to talk to you, they will. If they don’t, you don’t talk to them. Understood?”

“Understood.”

She studies me for a long moment.

“Evaria also said you’d say that, she vouched for you. So please don’t turn out to be a dick.” Bernadette says, and goes back inside.

Evaria arrives at six minutes past eight, out of breath, carrying a tray of coffees and a paper bag that smells of cinnamon.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She hurries through the side gate, juggling everything. “I was trying to leave and my sisters had a tribunal.”

“A tribunal.”

“About Arina. She came home without her lipstick last night.” She hands me a coffee and gives me a look over the top of it, like I’m supposed to understand the significance. “She was wearing it when she left.”

I think about Garick Lazovski, who Katya says has spent six years in love with Arina.

“Good for him,” I say.

“That’s what Milana said. Zhenya said it was a tactical error. Galana cried, but she cries at everything at the moment, much like me.” She takes a sip of her own coffee, then frowns at mine. “Try it. It’s from the place on Halsted. It’s much nicer than yours.”

“Nobody’s ever brought me coffee before,” I say, which isn’t what I meant to say at all.

She goes a little pink, and suddenly gets very interested in the paper bag.

She’s wearing old jeans, sneakers, and a gray sweatshirt with a hole in the cuff. Her black hair is tied up in a knot that’s already falling down on one side. She’s got no makeup on this morning. She is radiant.

She’s soft everywhere, with curves under that ugly sweatshirt that I’m trying very hard not to think about at eight in the morning in the backyard of a women’s shelter.

I look at the fence instead.

It’s worse than she said. Six panels down along the back of the yard, two of the posts snapped clean off at the base and the rest leaning like drunks. Whoever put it up used the cheapest pine he could find and didn’t treat any of it. The landlord isn’t going to fix this. The landlord’s going to wait until it falls down on somebody.

“Can you do it?” Evaria asks.

“I’ll need new posts. Concrete. Brackets.” I’m already making a list. “Better wood.”

“I don’t have a budget.”

“I didn’t ask for one.”

She opens her mouth to argue. I give her a look. She closes it again, and something in her face goes soft and stubborn at the same time, like she’s decided to argue with me later when I’m not expecting it.

I drive to the hardware store on Archer. When I get back, she’s already dragged the broken panels into a pile in the corner of the yard, and she’s sitting on the back step picking at her palm.

“Splinter,” she says, before I can ask.

“Let me see.”