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“Alone?”

“Alone. Nobody inside.”

“Grisha’s across the street. He can’t see the back.” In the background, I can hear another phone on speaker and Grisha’s voice. Nikolai says something short in Russian. Then, to me: “He’s on his way. Promise me you won’t go anywhere, Vera.”

On my screen, Daniel takes his phone out of his pocket.

A text banner slides down over the call:

Where are you? Back door. She’s not answering.

He thinks I’m on my way.

He puts his phone away, takes something out of his jacket pocket and fits it into the lock. Numb, I watch him try to turn it, take it out, and look at it. He tries again. The key I never knew he had, the one he held onto all these years like he always knew he would need it someday.

He stands there for a moment with his head down, away from the camera. Then he reaches inside his jacket again for something long and flat and dark, and wedges it into the frame beside the lock.

“He’s forcing the door,” I mumble into the phone.

The door gives. My phone shudders with the alert. Back door. Open. At his end, another alert sounds.

I tap the siren button. The confirmation fills the screen, and I tap yes.

On the kitchen feed, the swinging door bangs open, and Daniel comes through it with the bar still in his hand. He stops dead and looks straight up toward the noise. The camera captures his whole face. Pale. Mouth open. Eyes dark.

Then he’s gone, back through the door. The alley camera catches him leaving the way he came, running, the bar gone, one hand holding his hood.

“He’s running,” I say. “Back up the alley, away from Grisha.”

I can hear the siren through the phone now, a thin wail under my heavy heartbeat.

My phone beeps with another call. The alarm company. I put Nikolai on hold and give them the passcode. “It’s real,” I say. “Somebody broke the back door.”

The woman says, “The police are on their way. Are you safe?”

“I’m not there.” Feeling is coming back to me, and with it, white-hot rage at my ex-husband.

I switch back to Nikolai’s call and tell him the police are on their way.

“Grisha’s back in his car. He has Daniel in sight.” There’s a pause, then, “Vera, are you all right?”

That’s when my teeth start chattering.

My hand on the phone is shaking so hard I have to put my elbow on the table to keep it steady. I’m cold, the way I felt after my first fatal in the ER, when I went into the supply closet and shook for ten minutes with my forehead against the shelf.

“I’m all right,” I say. “I’m shaking. I’m all right.”

“Stay on the phone.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I watch the alley feed. The back door hangs open a few inches, crooked, light from the staff room spilling across the wet ground. I watch the kitchen feed, the swinging door still moving a little on its hinges. The siren screams on, and I don’t silence it. I let the whole block hear.

Somewhere on his end, a voice speaks in Russian.

“We’re going to follow,” Nikolai says.

“Where’s he going?”