Chapter 24
CHLOE
My phone rang from the counter while I was rinsing a bowl. The number on the screen wasn't one I had saved. Queens area code. I dried my hands on a dish towel and picked up.
"Is this Chloe Kim?"
The voice was professional. Older. Careful.
"Yes."
"This is Doctor Park, calling from the clinic on Northern Boulevard. Your grandmother put down your number a long time ago for emergencies."
The bowl I had just set in the drying rack suddenly seemed very loud. I went still against the counter.
"Is she okay?"
"She is fine. I wanted to say that first. She had a fall in her kitchen this morning. A neighbor heard her and brought her in. Bruised hip, a small fever we are watching. Nothing broken. Nothing serious."
The cold in my stomach softened a notch. Only a notch.
"But?"
"She will be slow for a few days, and she should not be on her own for the first week. Your grandmother is a stubborn woman. She will try the stairs, lift the laundry, cook her own dinner. None of that yet. If you have someone in the family who can stay with her, this is the time."
"I'll come," I said. "Today."
"Good. I told her you would say that. She told me not to bother you."
That sounded like her. My mouth pulled a little at the corner even with my hand braced on the counter.
"Thank you, Doctor."
"Take care of her."
"I will."
I hung up and stood there for one long breath with the towel still in my hand. Then I was already moving.
I found him in the back study. The door was open a finger's width.
His laptop sat in front of him, two stacks of paper at his elbow, a coffee cup at the corner of the desk that was half full and probably long cold.
The lamp was on even though it was barely past mid-morning.
His scarred knuckle tapped the edge of the desk in a slow rhythm while he read.
He looked up the second I crossed the threshold. Whatever he saw in my face made him close the laptop and stand.
"What is it?"
"My grandma had a fall," I said. "She is okay. But she needs me there for a few days."
He was moving before I finished the sentence.
His jacket was off the back of the chair and over his arm in one motion. Around the desk in two strides. The phone was already in his hand, his thumb finding a contact, the line ringing before he hit the door.
"Mikhail. Bring the car around. I need an hour, maybe two, then we leave for Queens."
"Daniil. No."
He did not hear me. He was checking his watch.
"I am coming with you."
"You can't."
"Pack what you need. I will have a sweep done of the building before we arrive."
"Daniil."
I stepped in front of him so he had to look at me. His gray-green eyes finally landed and held.
"You have things to fix here," I said. "Real things. You can't leave the compound for a week to sit on my grandma's couch and watch her sleep."
"Those things can wait."
"No. They can't." I kept my voice level. "The longer they wait, the more dangerous it gets for everyone, including me. You know that. I am going. You're staying. I'll come back."
His jaw set. He looked at the phone in his hand like he was deciding whether to ignore me. The phone did not go down.
"You will be alone in that apartment."
"I will be with my grandmother."
"Your grandmother is not security."
"My grandmother is the reason I am going at all. Put two men on the block if it helps you sleep. Put four. I don't care. But you are not coming."
"I can work from the road."
"You can't work in her living room with the TV blasting Korean drama and her telling you to take your shoes off and asking if you are the rich one or the poor one."
His mouth did something at the corner that almost reached a smile. Almost.
"She would ask that?"
"That will be her opening line the first second she meets you, and you are not meeting her like this. Not in the middle of an operation. Not when half your head is somewhere else. When this is done you can come. I want you to come. Just not now."
He looked at me for a long beat. His thumb finally came off the phone screen. He ran his free hand back through his hair, slow, and the lamplight caught the scar at his temple.
"Fine." A beat. "The moment everything here is done, I am coming for you. Not one minute longer."
"I know you will."
He lifted the phone again, but only to speak this time.
"Mikhail. Change of plans. The car still goes to Queens. I am not in it."
I exhaled. He hung up, set the phone face down on the desk, and stood there a second looking at me like he was trying to memorize the morning light on the side of my face.
Then he closed the distance, put both hands on my hips, and pulled me in against him. His chin came down on the top of my head. Neither of us said anything for a while.
The rest of the day, he was on me.
He was not pushy about it. He was just there.
A hand at the small of my back when we passed in the hall.
His thumb tracing my knuckles on the couch while I scrolled through something on my phone, slow and absent, like he didn't know he was doing it.
When I stood up at lunch to refill my water glass, his arm came around my waist and reeled me back down, and I ended up sideways in his lap with my legs across his thighs and his fingers playing with the cuff of my sleeve.
"You're going to need to let me up eventually," I said.
"Eventually is not now."
In the late afternoon we ended up on the bed with a book between us that neither of us was really reading.
I was on my side. He was behind me, his face tucked into the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and every few minutes he would breathe in slow like he was filing the scent of my hair away for later.
I twisted my head to look back at him over my shoulder, smiling.
"I'm not going to be gone forever."
His hand spread flat on my hip. Possessive in that quiet, settled way he had. He did not lift his face out of my hair.
"I am worried."
"You don't have to be. Put your men on me if it helps."
"I am putting my men on you whether you tell me to or not."
I laughed and turned the rest of the way around to face him, my forehead going to his chin, my hand sliding up to rest over his heart.
"I know how crazy you are."
"Good." His voice went low against the top of my head. "Then I do not have to explain it."
When the light started to turn that thin gold of late autumn, I finally got up to pack.
I pulled a small duffel from the closet and set it open on the foot of the bed.
He didn't move from where he was. He sat with his back against the headboard, one knee drawn up, watching me fold things into the bag the way another man might watch a fire.
Two sweaters. The soft pajamas. The toothbrush bag and the small case for my contacts. My charger. The cardigan my grandma had knit me a long winter ago, because she always noticed when I wore it.
His hand was on my ankle by the time I zipped the bag. Not gripping. Just resting. As if knowing where I was in the room had loosened something in him.
I leaned down and kissed the line of his jaw.
"Tomorrow morning," I said.
"Tomorrow morning," he agreed.
The drive into the city went fast in the cold blue light.
Ivan had the wheel and the bratva car was quiet on the bridge, the river dark and metallic below us, the skyline cutting hard shapes against a sky that had no warmth left in it.
I watched the buildings change as we came off the highway and threaded into Queens.
The signs went from English to bilingual to mostly Korean.
The bakeries showed up. The grocery with persimmons in the window showed up.
My shoulders dropped an inch I had not known they were holding.
Ivan parked at the curb in front of my grandma's building and got out before me to open my door. I told him I would call when I needed him. He told me, in a voice that was clearly Daniil's routed through his mouth, that he would be on the block until I did.
The stairwell smelled the way every stairwell in this building had smelled my whole life. Garlic from one apartment. Laundry soap from down the hall. The radiator clanked twice as I climbed, complaining about the cold. By the third floor I was smiling without deciding to.
I rang the bell.
A shuffle. A small careful step. The chain. The lock.
The door opened, and there she was. Smaller than I remembered, the way she always was. Her hair pinned back. Her cardigan buttoned wrong by one button. Her face did the thing her face did when she saw me, which was light up entirely and then immediately pretend it had not.
"Aigoo, you are too thin," she said, instead of hello, and pulled me inside by the wrist. "Skinny like a chopstick. I am feeding you tonight."
"Halmoni." I dropped the duffel by the door and got my arms around her, careful of her hip, and she patted my back twice fast the way she always did, like she was burping me.
"My Chloe-ya. Come, come. Take your shoes off. The doctor called you?"
"He did."
"Aigoo, that man. I told him not to." She waved her hand at the air like the doctor was floating there. "Only my hip is mad at me. The rest of me is fine."
"Your hip is enough."
"My hip is dramatic. Like a soap opera."
The TV was on. Low. A woman in a long coat was crying into a phone in a snowy park.
The plants on the windowsill were exactly as I remembered, the spider plant trailing down the side of the pot, the small jade thicker than it used to be, a new little succulent in a chipped teacup I didn't recognize.
The whole apartment smelled of doenjang, that soft fermented warmth, the pot quietly working away on the stove.
The framed photo of me on the side table was the same one, the one from the school trip where I had braces and was squinting into the sun.