Page 6

I spent three nights in that control room. On the second night, at ten past three in the morning, the kitchen camera picked up movement. A young woman in a cardigan and fluffy socks, making sandwiches. A dozen of them, maybe more. She wrapped each one in wax paper, wrote something on it in black marker, and carried them out on a tray to the gatehouse, where her father’s men were working the night shift in the cold.

I zoomed in on the next night’s batch. She’d written their names on them. Every one. She knew all twelve.

The men at the gate didn’t thank her. Two of them didn’t even look up from their phones. She didn’t seem to expect them to. She just went back inside and washed the cutting board and turned off the light.

That was the first time I saw her.

I went back to Yaroslav the following week and told him I’d changed my mind.

He didn’t ask why. He just poured two glasses of brandy and looked at his chessboard for a long time. Then he said, Somebody in my house is talking, Caleb. Find out who.

He died before I could.

“My father hinted,” Galana says slowly, watching my face, “that you’d be good at keeping us safe. He said that to Viktor. Viktor told Zhenya, and Zhenya told the rest of us.” She tilts her head. “Is that why? Because you think we’re not safe?”

She’s sharper than her sisters give her credit for. Sharper than she gives herself credit for, I’d bet.

“Your father had enemies,” I say. “Everyone knows that.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“No,” I admit. “It isn’t.”

She waits for more. I don’t give it to her. And instead of pushing, she picks up her fork and takes a bite of apple cake. She chews it slowly, and something in her shoulders lets go.

“This is really good,” she says, surprised. “You should have some.”

“I don’t eat sweet things.”

“Everybody eats sweet things.” She cuts off a corner with the side of her fork, puts it on a napkin, and pushes it across the table to me with one finger. “Try it.”

I look at the napkin. Then at her.

She lifts her chin a fraction. It’s the smallest act of defiance I’ve ever seen, and it hits me harder than it should.

I eat the cake.

We stay for an hour. She asks where I grew up. Brighton Beach, until I was twelve, and then here. She asks if I have a dog. No. She asks if I want one. I don’t know. Nobody’s ever asked me that either.

She does most of the talking in the end, once she starts. About her sisters and the house, about a medovik setting in the fridge that she says I’m not allowed to see yet. She never once mentions herself unless I ask, and every time I do ask, she looks startled, like I’ve handed her something heavy without warning.

I pay at the counter. She tries to give the old woman a twenty, and I take it out of her hand and put it back in her coat pocket.

“Caleb,” she protests.

It’s the first time she’s said my name and I wonder if I’ll remember this moment forever. It feels like I will.

I keep my face very still. “Next time.”

“There’s going to be a next time?”

“There’s going to be a lot of next times.”

I hold the door for her, and she steps out ahead of me into the cold. The sky has turned flat white. The sidewalk is quiet. A woman pushing a stroller, a delivery van idling at the corner, a man across the street in a navy parka with a takeout coffee cup.

He was on the corner when we went in. The cup is still full. There’s no steam coming off the lid.

I don’t change my pace. I move to the curb side of Galana and rest my hand at the small of her back. It’s light enough that she reads it as manners and turns to smile at me. I walk her to the Volvo, open the door, wait for her to tuck her coat in, and shut it.