Page 14

I’ve been waiting for it all day. I’ve been working out how to say it since she asked yesterday in my office.

“I was seventeen,” I say. “My father sent me to collect from a man called Lysenko. He owed four thousand dollars. He had a tailor’s shop on Western. Nothing special.” I turn the cup in my hands. “My father told me if I didn’t come back with the money, I should come back with his hand.”

Evaria goes very still beside me.

“Lysenko didn’t have the money. So I broke his hand.”

I make myself keep going.

“His daughter was in the back of the shop. She was about Kira’s age. She came out when she heard him scream, and she stood there in the doorway and watched me do it.” I look at the new fence posts standing in a row. Straight. Noah made sure of that. “She didn’t cry either. Just watched me. Like she was memorizing my face.”

I’ve never told anyone this. Not even Kira.

“I went home and gave my father his money. He said, good. That’s all he ever said when you did something well.” I set the cup down on the step. “I turned eighteen and left a month later. I couldn’t look at my own face in the mirror without seeing hers.”

The silence sits between us for a long time.

I don’t look at her. I don’t want to see her face change. I don’t want to watch her move an inch farther down the step.

Then her hand slides across the space between us and settles over mine.

That’s all. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault, or that I was only a boy, or any of the things people say when they don’t know what else to do. She just leaves her hand there on top of mine, small and warm.

I turn my hand over. Her fingers slide between mine.

We sit there like that until the sun goes down behind the new fence.

My phone goes while I’m loading the tools back into the truck.

Gleb. He’s the man who books my collections. He finds the work, takes his twenty percent, and doesn’t ask questions I wouldn’t want to answer.

“I’ve got a job for tonight,” he says. “Double rate.”

“Whose?”

“Rusakov’s.”

I stop with a shovel in my hand.

“I don’t work for Rusakov.”

“You do tonight. It’s easy money. Belov needs a few extra men down at the Port District. Some warehouse dispute. One of the dead man’s docks.” Gleb laughs. “The old bastard’s barely cold, and his girls think they can run his business. Rusakov wants to remind everyone what happens to a house with no man in it.”

My entire body tenses.

Evaria’s car is still parked out front. Through the shelter’s front window, I can see her in the kitchen with Bernadette, laughing at something, her hair finally down around her shoulders.

“Which dead man?” I ask, though I already know.

“Maximov. Theo, you in or not?”

I hang up.

Then I stand in the street with the shovel in my hand and my heart beating slow and hard in my chest. It always does that. Right before.

I call Kira. She answers on the second ring with a baby screaming in the background.

“I need Timur Lazovski’s number,” I say. “Now.”