Chapter 4 #3
“Make some chocolate,” I said, and colored the feather to its edge, slowly. I didn’t tell him that the Sicilian’s voice had followed me all the way home along the water, saying I didn’t mistake you for a woman waiting to be rescued, in a tone I was still, hours later, trying to understand.
After he’d made and drunk another sickly sweet hot chocolate, I took the folded paper out of the pencil tin.
“What’s that?” Kiryl asked.
“A gift from the Sicilian.” I unfolded it on the floor between us and smoothed the crease flat.
“He left it under my folder at dinner. Made it look like carelessness. It wasn’t carelessness—that man has never dropped anything in his life.
” I tapped the header. “Northbridge Freight. A reservation against our cold chain. Forty refrigerated slots a month, Newark and Elizabeth, standing allocation, effective the first.”
Kiryl leaned over the page. People forgot, because he was gentle, that he was also clever. I never forgot. I was counting on it.
“But the shares don’t transfer until the wedding,” he said slowly. “Nobody outside the family can book against the network until—” He looked up. “Someone’s selling capacity they don’t own yet.”
“Gianni is selling capacity he doesn’t own yet.
Through a dead man’s company. That’s what the accountant flew across the country to prove, and Papa sat there and let him prove it, because Papa already knew.
” I pulled the lipstick tube out of the pajama pocket where it had lived since dinner, uncapped it, and held out my hand. “Laptop.”
He fetched his school laptop from the dressing room route, and we sat shoulder to shoulder on the nursery floor and I plugged the drive in and opened the fleet schedule.
“Read me the Northbridge dates,” I said. “First column.”
He read. I scrolled. I laid the reservation schedule against my own dispatch grid week by week, looking for the collision, and instead I found the door.
I stopped scrolling.
“What?“ Kiryl said. “What is it?”
“Tuesday.” I turned the screen toward him.
“Refrigerated unit out of Newark, oh-six-hundred, long haul to Chicago. Regular run—produce for the supermarket account, it goes every week.” My finger moved down the line to the driver assignment, and something in my chest did a thing I hadn’t let it do in two years. “Look at the driver.”
He read the name. “Vasily Chernenko.” He looked at me blankly. He’d been eight. He wouldn’t remember.
“He drove for Mama,” I said. “Before the fleet was a fleet — when it was six trucks and a rented lot, he was the first driver she ever hired. He taught me the dispatch system when I was seventeen because Mama told him to and because he thought it was funny, the boss’s daughter learning load orders.
” I could see him if I closed my eyes—the tea he drank from a jar, the photographs of his granddaughters taped to the visor.
“When Mama died, Papa wanted to cut the old drivers’ routes.
I stopped it. Quietly, through the paperwork.
Vasily knows exactly who signs his checks and exactly who kept him on them.
” I looked at my brother. “He is the one man in that entire operation who would drive off the map for me and never once ask why.”
Kiryl was very still. The laptop’s glow made him look younger, which I would not have thought possible.
“Tuesday,” he said carefully. “You want us in that truck.”
“I want us in that cab.” My hands were steady now.
This was the version of me that didn’t shake—give me a crisis and a plan and I am a rational woman doing useful work.
“And it’s better than that. The Section C compressor repair completes Tuesday.
It’s already scheduled—I authorized it myself, tonight, before dinner.
It’s in the system with my name on it. So on Monday I inform my father that I’m inspecting the completed repair Tuesday morning, because a four-hundred-thousand-dollar contract sits in that section and I have inspected every major repair for six years.
It isn’t a request that needs granting. It’s what I do.
It’s why he lets me exist.” I pulled up the facility’s visitor protocols.
“And I list you as accompanying. Trainee. Observer. Gianni himself handed me the excuse at dinner—a Sokolov should learn how the world actually works. Fine. You’re learning cold storage.
Papa will approve it because it makes you useful and me occupied, his two favorite conditions. ”
“And then?”