Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Alex
The grocery store is three blocks from the apartment, and I've done this particular errand so many times that my body runs it on autopilot — basket, produce section, the specific brand of yogurt Evie will eat and the two she won't, the coffee that's on sale this week versus the coffee that isn't. I know this store the way I know everything I depend on: completely, practically, without sentimentality.
So I notice immediately when something feels wrong.
It's not a sound. It's not a person I can point to.
It's that feeling — the one that lives in the back of my chest and has never once been wrong — the low, persistent hum that says someone is paying attention to you before your eyes have found the source.
I slow down in the cereal aisle and make a show of reading the back of a box while I use the reflective surface of the freezer door at the end of the row to look behind me.
Nothing. Nobody I can identify. A woman with a stroller, an older man comparing prices, a teenager who is visibly not paying attention to anything except his phone.
I put the cereal in my basket and keep moving.
It's been like this for three days. Since the night at Onyx, since I came home in a stranger's jacket and stood in my bathroom and held my hands under cold water and told myself it was over, that I'd handled it, that the man with the pale blue eyes had let me go, and that was the end of it.
I told myself that every morning for three days and every morning for three days my chest did not believe me.
I pay for my groceries, walk home, and check behind me twice and see nothing both times.
Evie is dressed and fed and working on something at the kitchen table when I get back, which means she's been up long enough to get herself ready without being asked, which means she slept well, which is the first thing I check every morning before I check anything else.
"Morning," she says, without looking up.
"Morning." I put the groceries away, pour coffee, lean against the counter, and look at her.
She's got colored pencils spread around her in a radius that has claimed most of the table, which means it's an art project, which means it's for pleasure rather than school.
Evie draws when she's in a good mood. It's one of my favorite things to know about her. "What is it?"
She turns the paper around. A building, detailed and careful, with windows she's filled in with different colors. "Our building," she says. "I'm giving everyone different curtains."
"What color did you give us?"
"Green. Like your eyes." She turns it back and adds a line. "Mr. Roberts got orange because he has an orange blanket."
"What about Marta?"
"Purple. She seems like a purple person." She adds another window. "Did you get the yogurt?"
"The right kind."
"Good. The other one tastes like sadness."
I drink my coffee and watch her draw and let the morning be quiet for a few minutes, which is a thing I've learned to do — to take the quiet when it's available instead of filling it with the next thing on the list. Then I put my mug in the sink and pick up my bag.
"I'll be at the café until four," I tell her. "Mr. Roberts knows you're home. I'll check in at lunch." I pause. "Evie."
She looks up.
"The door stays locked today. All day." I keep my voice even, not alarmed, not the voice that makes her worry.
Just the instruction voice, the one she knows, is non-negotiable.
"Don't open it for anyone except Mr. Roberts or Marta.
Not for anyone who says they know me. Not for anyone who says they're a friend. Not for anyone."
She looks at me for a moment with those serious eyes. "Is something wrong?"
"No," I say. "I'm just reminding you."
"You only say it like that when something is wrong."
She's not incorrect, which is inconvenient. "I say it like that because it's important," I say. "There's a difference."
She accepts this with the expression that says we will be revisiting this later. "Okay," she says. "Door locked. Got it."
I kiss the top of her head. She goes back to her drawing. I let myself out and stand in the hallway and listen to both locks slide home and the doorknob rattle as she tests it from the inside, and some of the tightness in my chest eases.
Some of it, anyway.
The café is six blocks from the apartment, and my shift starts at eight, which means I have four minutes when I arrive, which is enough time to tie my apron, check the section chart, and call Evie before the first tables need coffee.
She picks up on the second ring. "I just talked to you forty minutes ago," she says, by way of greeting.
"I know. Did you lock the door?"
"Yes, Alex."
"Both locks?"
"Both locks and the doorknob, same as always. Mr. Roberts waved at me through the peephole." A pause. "He doesn't know I can see him doing it."
"Don't tell him," I say. "It would break his heart."
"I know." She sounds fond when she says it, which is another thing I love about her — the way she's decided to love Mr. Roberts despite herself, the way she let him in past the caution that keeps most people out. "Are you going to call me every hour?"
"Maybe every two," I say. "Don't push it."
She makes a sound that is almost a laugh. "I'm fine, Alex. I'm going to finish my drawing and then heat up the leftover pasta and then probably read for a while. Marta said she'd knock at noon."
"Good." I lean against the wall in the back hallway and lower my voice. "Evie, I need to ask you something and I need you to tell me exactly what you remember."
"About the man," she says. Not a question.
Of course, she knew. She always knows. "You said an old friend of mine came by," I say, keeping my voice light, keeping it the voice that is curious rather than alarmed. "Tell me about him."
"He was tall," she says. "Dark hair. He had really light eyes, kind of blue but not really. And he had a scar on his face." She pauses. "He came with Mr. Roberts so I let him in. He said he was going to be living across the hall."
The coffee I had this morning does something unpleasant in my stomach. "He said that?"
“Yes.” Another pause. "Alex, he helped me with my math.
The long division thing I couldn't figure out.
He explained it totally differently and it actually made sense.
" She says this with the particular enthusiasm she reserves for things that have genuinely impressed her, which is a short list. "He was nice. He said he'd come back."
He was nice. Victor Rozovsky, or whatever his name actually is, the man who watched me run without moving an inch, the man who planted himself across the hall from my apartment — nice.
"Okay," I say, because my voice is doing fine and I need to keep it that way. "That's good. Did he say anything else?"
"Not really. We just did math." A beat. "He's not actually an old friend of yours, is he."
It's not a question. It never is, with Evie.
"I'm not sure," I say, which is the closest thing to honest I can manage right now. "But Mr. Roberts liked him?"
"Mr. Roberts basically adopted him," she says, dryly. "He was practically offering him soup."
I exhale slowly. Mr. Roberts's instincts are not infallible, but they're not nothing, either.
Thirty years of managing a building full of people has given him a kind of radar for the ones who intend harm, and he's never once been wrong in the two years I've known him.
If he walked this man upstairs and let him through Evie's door, that means something. Not everything, but something.
And Evie wasn't scared. Evie, who flinches at raised voices and clocks every exit in every room and has never once opened the door to a stranger without running the full calculation first — Evie let him in and did homework with him and is waiting for him to come back.
If he'd wanted to hurt her, he'd had every opportunity.
He hadn't.
"If he comes by again," I say, carefully, "you call me immediately. Before you open the door."
"I know, Alex."
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it." Her voice softens slightly, the way it does when she's decided to be patient with me rather than frustrated. "I'll call you. I'm fine. Go wait tables."
"I love you," I say.
"Love you too," she says. "Both locks."
She hangs up.
I think about it between tables.
Between the couple at four who want separate checks and the businessman at seven who wants his eggs a specific way that requires three clarifications, I think about a man with pale blue eyes who found my apartment, charmed my building manager, helped my daughter with her homework, and told her he was moving in across the hall.
I think about what kind of person does that.
What kind of person has that kind of reach — finds an address that shouldn't be findable, plants himself in my building the next day — and then spends an evening doing long division with a twelve-year-old.
Not the kind of person who intends simple harm. Simple harm doesn't require this much architecture.
Which means the architecture is for something else, and I don't know what that something else is yet, and the not knowing is the part that sits in my chest and hums.
By noon, I've mostly convinced myself that I'm catastrophizing.
That the man Evie described, the one who made the long division click and promised to come back and passed Mr. Roberts's unofficial vetting process — that man is probably not the same man from the club.
Victor, if that was actually his name, had pale blue eyes and a scar and dark hair.
So does the man Evie described. But men who do what he does don't make house calls to do children's homework.
They send people. They manage problems from a distance.
He let me run. That's not what someone does when they're planning to be a problem.
By two, I've unconvinced myself again.
By three, Rosa has noticed I keep looking at the back door and has asked me twice if I'm expecting someone, which I deny, and she accepts this with the expression of someone who doesn't believe me and has decided not to push it yet.
At three-fifty, I take the trash out.
The back exit opens onto a narrow alley that runs between our building and the dry cleaner next door — dumpsters at the end, a single overhead light, the particular smell of a city alley in November that is not pleasant but is honest. I've done this run a dozen times.
It takes ninety seconds. I push the door open with my shoulder, trash bag in hand, and walk to the dumpster, lift the lid, drop the bag in, and turn around.
Victor is leaning against the wall six feet away with his hands in his jacket pockets and the expression of a man who has been there long enough to be comfortable about it.
He's in a different jacket than the one I'm still keeping on the hook by my door — dark this time, not grey — and he looks exactly the same as he looked in the club, which is to say unreasonably still and entirely too present and like someone who doesn't belong in a narrow alley behind a café and doesn't particularly care.
"You've been following me," I say.
"I've been nearby," he says.
"That's the same thing."
"Is it." He says it without the inflection that would make it a question. His eyes are doing the thing they did in the club — reading me, filing me, attending to me with that quality of focus that makes my skin feel like it's been turned inside out. "You look tired."
"I wonder why." My heart is doing something inadvisable behind my ribs, and I am extremely annoyed at it. "You moved into my building."
"4D," he says. "Good unit. Faces the right direction."
"You cannot just—" I stop. Take a breath. Start again, because whatever this conversation needs to be, it does not need to be me losing my composure in an alley behind a café. "You can't do that. You can't follow me and move into my building and talk to my daughter—"
"Your daughter is impressive," he says. "She has a good mind. She was getting the long division wrong because the method is inefficient, not because she can't do it."
"Don't talk about her." The sharpness in my voice surprises even me. "Don't — she is not part of this."
"She lives with you," he says. "Which makes her part of everything that concerns you, and you concern me.
" He pushes off the wall, unhurried, and the alley is narrow enough that the distance between us is already less than I'd like without him having moved very far. "You've been nervous for three days."
"I wonder why," I say again.
"You've been checking behind you on your walk to the store. You varied your route twice." He tilts his head slightly. "You're doing exactly what you should be doing. I wanted you to know that."
"You wanted me to know you've been watching me," I say. "That's what you wanted."
Something moves at the edge of his mouth. "I wanted you to know you're not wrong to be careful." He stops close enough that I'd have to step back to create a reasonable distance between us, and I don't step back, because stepping back is the thing I'm not going to do. "I also wanted to see you."
"You also wanted to terrify me in an alley."
"Are you terrified?"
I look at him. He looks back, with those pale eyes and that infuriating stillness and the corner of his mouth doing the thing it does that is almost a smile and isn't quite.
The honest answer is that I am not terrified, which is the part I find most alarming.
I am annoyed, and I am very aware of the lack of distance between us.