Jasper
The yard opens at five and I'm on the weighbridge by ten past with a clipboard of night tickets and my breath showing in front of me.
Mist off the water sits low over the containers at the eastern fence, and the gulls are already up on the roofline of the long shed, waiting for somebody to drop something worth having.
The floodlights are on the timer that switches them off at half five whether anyone is finished or not, which is a small thing that has been irritating me for two years.
Paulo comes through the gate with the first of the trucks and lifts two fingers off the wheel.
The whole place starts moving the way it does every morning, slowly and then all at once.
Mechislav is in the office above the loading floor with the window open, he has the manifests laid out across the desk in the order I asked for.
"Eleven loads," he says. "Weights are inside a hundred pounds on all of them."
"And the Fenwick route?"
"Ninety pounds under. Which is nothing."
"It's nothing this week." I go down the column with my finger anyway, because a man who steals from you slowly is the only kind who lasts. Since Tolya Semenov, every ticket in this yard gets read twice, and the drivers know it.
Semenov himself is on the floor by six, loading, which is where he's going to stay until I decide otherwise. He comes up the stairs at half past with an envelope and stands in the doorway holding it in both hands like a man at a graveside.
"First payment," he says.
I count it in front of him because pretending not to would insult us both. It's four hundred short.
He starts talking before I've finished. His wife's hours were cut, the boiler went, the younger one needs shoes, and every word of it is probably true and none of it changes the facts.
"Four hundred goes on the end," I tell him. "It doesn't disappear. You'll pay it next month or the month after, and you'll tell me before you're short, not after, because the next time you make me count an envelope twice I'll take an interest in why."
He nods hard enough that his glasses shift.
"And Tolya." He stops in the doorway. "Fenn Road does a shoe voucher through the office. Ask to talk to my sister, Yulia Federova, she works there."
He looks at me for a moment too long, the way people do when they can't work out which version of me they've just been handed, and then he goes back down to the floor. Mechislav says nothing at all.
The rest of the morning is ordinary work.
A refrigerated unit that has been reading two degrees warm since Tuesday and needs a man out from the city who owes us a favor.
A camera at the north gate pointing eleven feet to the left of where it should be pointing, which I have moved myself, standing on the roof of my own car, because it will take a contractor three weeks and a discussion.
A driver called Kolya whose timings have slipped by twenty minutes on the same run four days running.
Natan wants to put him in a room. I sit in the cab with him instead and find out his mother is at St. Anne's and visiting hours end at seven, so I move him onto the early route where he'll be done by four, and he grips my arm at the elbow and can't speak for a second.
Eduard arrives at eleven with Dmitri behind him.
We walk the floor together. The Marchetti buyer is closed, confirmed by two separate people, and the route over the bridge stays ours, and there's a question about the eastern lot that will take a month and a conversation neither of us is looking forward to.
Business, in other words, all of it exactly as dull as I need it to be.
At the door of the office he stops and looks at the shoebox on top of the filing cabinet.
"You bought running shoes."
"I did."
He waits. Eduard has never in his life had to ask me a second question, and he doesn't now, he simply stands there with his hands in his coat pockets and lets the silence do the work, and I discover that I have nothing at all to put in it.
"Bill has instructed me to accompany her," I say eventually.
"Bill." He nods slowly. "Bill has instructed you." Something moves at the corner of his mouth. He says one short thing in Russian on his way out that I choose not to dignify with a response, and I hear him laughing about it with Dmitri all the way across the loading floor.
My phone goes at half twelve.
Delilah: Kimmie has increased the order to a hundred and forty buns
Delilah: I said yes before I did the math
Delilah: Jasper I have made a terrible mistake
Me: How many can you make in a day
Delilah: Sixty. Maybe. If nobody talks to me.
Me: Then you’ll have three days and I'll keep people away from you
Delilah: This is why I keep you
I put the phone face down on the manifests and get on with my afternoon.
The shoes cost more than I expected and the man in the shop asked me a great many questions about my gait.
I sit in the yard at five with the engine running and the gate open in front of me.
I don't move for a while. The glovebox has the registration documents in it and a small box that has been living underneath them since July last year, when I walked past a window on Halstead Row for the eleventh time and finally went in.
It's an old ring. Gold gone soft and warm at the edges, one stone, set low.
Last November, a woman came into the café with a new engagement ring and put her hand out across the counter for inspection, and Delilah made all the correct noises and then said, after the woman had gone, that whatever anyone gave her it had better sit flat, because half the rings she'd ever admired would be full of dough inside a week.
She was refilling the sugar while she said it. I doubt she even remembers saying it.
Delilah is standing at the gravel lot by the main entrance at ten to eight in her yellow reflective jacket, doing the thing where she stretches one heel up behind her against the railing and loses her balance and pretends she meant to.
She looks at my feet for a long moment.
"Those are new," she observes, trying for casual but still sounding surprised.
"They are."
The light is going gold and long over the water, and the path is damp from the afternoon.
I follow her down onto it and she sets a pace that is entirely conversational.
Which is the point. She talks for the whole of the first half mile, about a hundred and forty cinnamon buns, Bill's opinion on the new bins by the bandstand, and Lucifer having discovered the top of the pastry case and what this means for civilization.
I know every yard of this path. I know it in the dark. I have stood in that gravel lot in November rain and January fog and told myself a great many sensible things about security, and the truth is I have known her routine for six months and this is the first time I have been on it beside her.
We come past the boat sheds and the path bends left into the stretch where the lamps give out for eleven yards..
At the bandstand she slows to a walk with her hands on her head, breathing hard, and drops onto the bench facing the water with her jacket unzipped and her hair coming down in silky tendrils.
"Okay," she says. "Be honest. On a scale of one to ten, how much did you hate that."
"Four."
"Four?"
"It's a low four." I sit down next to her. The water has gone the color of an old coin, and somewhere out past the boat sheds a dog is being called.
"I've spent six months in that parking lot," I tell her.
She goes quiet.
"Every night you've come out here I've been sitting in the dark at that gate, and I told Eduard it was security, and I told myself it was security, and it was.
All of it was true." I look at the path where it comes down off Merrow Street.
"It was also the only forty minutes of my day I looked forward to.
I'd wait for the gate to bang and then I'd sit there and listen to you go past and I'd go home, and that was the whole of it, and I would have gone on doing it forever. "
She smiles softly, and shakes her head, unsure of where this is going.
"You have a café full of people who love you and a friend who'd fight anyone in this town for you, and I have a life I'm not going to bring through your front door.
I've thought about that more than you know.
And I've come to the conclusion that keeping you at a distance was never protecting you, it was just the version I could manage on my own. "
The dog is still ignoring whoever is calling it.
I take the box out of my jacket and open it on my knee, and she stops breathing altogether.
"I don't want to be the man in the parking lot," I say. "I want to be the one you come home to. Marry me, Delilah."
For a moment she does absolutely nothing, and I get a very clear look at the inside of my own chest.
Then her hand comes up over her mouth and she makes a sound that is half laugh and she says, "It sits flat."
"It sits flat."
"How did you know?" she asks as I pull it from the little padded cushion.
"I heard you tell the sugar jar."
"You were in the corner," she repeats, and then she's crying properly, and laughing, and hitting me once on the shoulder with the flat of her hand, which I take to be a good sign. "Yes. Obviously, yes."
I get the ring onto her finger with the last of the light going off the water, and she looks at it for about two seconds before she has her arms around my neck and her cold nose against my jaw. I hold on to her on a park bench in front of the boat sheds and a dog with no interest in authority.
"Everyone is going to be unbearable," she says into my collar.
"Bill will take credit."
"Bill will absolutely take credit." She pulls back and wipes her face with her sleeve as she looks at me with her eyes swimming and her hair everywhere. "You have to feed me now. I have ran miles."
"You've ran one and a half miles."
We walk back to her apartment with her hand in mine and her thumb moving over the ring every few steps as though she's checking it's still there.