Chapter 5
ADRIANA
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS EARLIER…
The train slides into the city and spits me back out into the noise.
I step onto the sidewalk outside the station and breathe it in.
Diesel, hot pretzel carts, wet concrete, a thousand conversations trying to be heard at once.
New York feels like it always has, crowded and impatient, a place that forgets you fast if you let it.
I pull my coat tighter and fish out my phone.
Julianne’s frantic call sits at the top of my mind like a bruise.
I tried her again on the ride in. Nothing.
I tried Maksim. Nothing there either. I told myself I would go straight to the house, walk up to the door, and demand answers.
Instead I scroll to Bella’s name and hit call.
She picks up on the second ring. “Tell me you’re actually outside and not chickening out in Philly.”
“I’m here,” I say. “Penn. Seventh Avenue side.”
She laughs under her breath. “You sound like trouble. Stay put.”
I tuck the phone away and watch the traffic surge and stall. A street musician works a saxophone near the curb, steady and unbothered by the cold. A couple argues over a suitcase with a broken wheel. I count the yellow cabs until I stop pretending I’m not stalling.
Ten minutes later a dented gray hatchback noses into a gap by the fire hydrant. Bella leans over from the driver’s seat and pops the lock. “Get in before a traffic cop writes my obituary,” she says.
I slide into the passenger seat with my bag on my lap. She looks the same and not the same. Same quick eyes, same chipped black nail polish, hair pulled into a loose knot that should fall apart but doesn’t.
“You look exhausted,” she says, pulling away from the curb. “And like you haven’t eaten something that isn’t from a vending machine in two days.”
“I had coffee.”
“That is not food.” She glances at me. “You really came back.”
“I had to.”
She doesn’t ask why. She knows me well enough to let silence do its work for a block or two. We pass a florist shoving buckets of tulips onto the sidewalk, a deli with a line that snakes out the door, a man selling umbrellas even though the sky is only threatening rain.
“Are you going to them tonight?” she asks finally.
I watch the city smear by the window. “Not yet. I want a shower and an hour to think without voices in my ear.”
“Good,” she says. “You can have both. And a bagel. And a couch if you need to crash.”
“Thanks.”
She drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “You heard anything from your sister?”
“No.”
“Maksim?”
“Nothing.”
Her mouth tightens. “Alright. We start with food and a plan. Then you tell me how deep you’re in with whatever mess dragged you back.”
I stare at a sliver of sky between buildings. “Deep enough.”
Bella nods once, like she was ready for that. “I’m right there with you, you know that, right?”
I don’t reply, partly because I don’t want her anywhere near my mess.
A light turns green and the car rolls forward. I let my head rest against the seat and breathe in the smell of her cheap vanilla air freshener and city air leaking through the vents. I’m home, if that is still the word, and the ground already feels like it wants to shift under my feet.
“Bagel first,” Bella says. “Then war.”
We take the first turn off Seventh and end up in a bagel place that smells like warm bread and burnt coffee, the kind of corner shop that forgets to wipe the sugar off the counter but always gets the order right.
Bella orders for both of us without asking, and I don’t fight her.
My hands are still cold from standing outside the station and I need the heat of a paper cup to give them something to do.
She watches me while the espresso machine hisses. “I can take you back to my place,” she says. “Shower, sleep, the good towels. My mother will feed you like she’s been waiting all year.”
“I shouldn’t,” I say.
“You should,” she answers, like the matter is already settled.
I shake my head. “I need to keep moving. If I go home with you, I’ll stay, and I cannot afford to sit still.”
The counter bell dings. Bella carries the tray to a small table by the window, pushes a bagel toward me, and waits until I take a bite before she goes on.
“You think I don’t know what it looks like when you’re running.
I’ve known you since we were kids. You used to hide in the pantry behind the sacks of flour when your father had guests.
I would bring you cookies my mother burned and you would eat them anyway. ”
I smile despite the knot in my stomach. “She never burned them. She just liked them darker than everyone else.”
“She burned them,” Bella says, but her mouth softens. “She made twice as many because she knew you would sneak half of them. You remember.”
Of course I remember. Bella’s mother started in our house when I was ten, a quiet woman with quick hands who hummed under her breath when she cooked.
She treated me like a child even when the adults in my family already expected me to act like an heir, and that small kindness felt like a private door I could slip through when the house was on display for the world.
I met Bella in the back corridor where deliveries came in.
We traded small things at first, a hair ribbon for a magazine, a story for a story, and then one afternoon she showed me where the service gate stuck if you lifted it by the rusted bar, and we slipped out to the sidewalk like we’d done it all our lives.
“You can stay with me,” Bella says again, quieter now. “I’m not asking questions you don’t want to answer. I’m saying you don’t have to be alone.”
I wrap my fingers around the coffee and keep my eyes on the street. “Your address will be obvious to anyone who cares to look. I don’t want trouble at your door.”
“You say that like it’s already following you.”
“It usually is,” I say.
“Then let me drive you to my place for an hour,” she says finally. “You take a shower, you change, you eat something that’s not coffee. After that I’ll drop you wherever you want to go. Hotel, station, a friend. I don’t care. But I’m not letting you run on empty.”
“I’ll take the hotel,” I say. “Something quiet, cash at the desk, no questions.”
Her mouth tightens. “You’re not a ghost, Adi.”
“I need to be one for a little while,” I say. “Did you find anything about Anya?”
“No, but I’m hearing rumors that another girl was taken.”
A chill goes through me.
“Who?”
“My mom is working at a new house part-time, your Aunt Olive,” Bella says. I remember the name vaguely; her husband is an enforcer in the Bratva. “Her younger son’s ex-girlfriend.”
“Any link between the two and Julianne?” I ask.
“I’m not sure.”
“Crap,” I say, pulling my hair back. One was bad enough, and now this. What’s going on?
Bella nudges the bagel closer. “Eat. You can think later. My mother will be insulted if I return you looking thinner than when you arrived.”
I take another bite. The sesame seeds stick to my fingers and the steam fogs the window where my wrist brushes the glass.
For a second, I’m not planning my next call or the next train or how to walk into a house I left years ago.
For a second, I’m sitting across from the girl who used to meet me at the service gate with a paper cup of tea and a grin she could never hide, the one person who spoke to me like the house did not own me.
“I thought about calling your mother,” I say. “She would know how to get a message through.”
“She would,” Bella says, and there’s pride in her voice. “She would also put you to bed and stand in front of the door with a wooden spoon until you slept.”
“That sounds about right.”
We finish the food, and I feel the heat return to my hands. The part of me that keeps score settles down enough to breathe.
Bella gathers the trash and stands. “Come on. There’s a place in Queens that takes cash and still changes the sheets,” she says. “You can shower and think, and then you can decide how to walk into whatever is waiting.”
Outside, the air has the kind of bite that finds the gaps in your coat. She unlocks the car and looks across the roof at me. “I know you’re going to tell me I should stay out of this.”
“You should,” I say, because it’s true.
She unlocks the other door. “Too bad.”
I check in under a false name and pay cash. The room is small but clean, the sheets crisp, the water hot. After a shower I sit on the bed with my phone in my hand, staring at Julianne’s last missed call until the screen goes dark. I wake it again and scroll to a number I haven’t dialed in years.
My mother answers on the first ring, my name catching in her throat. “Adi?”
“I’m in the city,” I say. “I want to see you.”
There’s a silence long enough for me to hear the faint clink of a cup being set down. I can almost picture her in the kitchen, one hand braced on the counter, weighing what this will cost.
“Adriana, you shouldn’t be here,” she says.
A chill goes through me. “What are you talking about? I’m here for Julianne. She’s in trouble, isn’t she? I spoke to Dad.”
“You did what?” I can hear her balking.
“Mom, please,” I beg. “Just meet me once. I meant what I said all those years ago. I never meant to abandon you guys. I just had to leave…”
I can hear her sigh softly.
“Where?” she asks at last. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Queens. I can meet you anywhere you like.”
Another pause, then, “There’s a tea shop near Jackson Heights. Corner of Seventy-fourth. Twenty minutes.”
“I’ll be there.”
I hang up before I can second-guess it.
The tea shop is small and bright, glass jars crowding the shelves, steam fogging the front window.
She’s already there by the time I arrive, both hands around a cup she hasn’t started drinking from.
Her hair is pinned back the way she wore it when guests came to the house. She looks the same and older at once.