Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Alex
The apartment smells like something good when I push through the door, which means Mr. Roberts has been cooking again, which means Evie asked him to, which means she was hungry before I got home and didn't want to say so when I called.
They're at the counter when I come in — Mr. Roberts on the stool side, Evie across from him with her elbows on the surface and her chin in her hands, deep in whatever conversation they were having before the door opened. She looks up when she hears my keys.
"You're late," she says.
"I'm twelve minutes late," I say.
"Mr. Roberts made soup."
"I can smell it." I drop my bag on the hook and look at him. "You didn't have to do that."
"I was making it anyway." He waves a hand. "Too much for one person. Evie kept me company." He slides off the stool with the careful deliberateness of a man who has learned to negotiate his knees without comment. "I'll leave you to it. There's enough for tomorrow if you want it."
"Stay," Evie says immediately, in the tone she uses when she's decided something and is informing the room of it. "Alex is going to make pasta anyway. You can have both."
Mr. Roberts looks at me. I look at him. "She's not wrong," I say. "Stay."
He stays.
I am elbow deep in the pasta situation — water on, salt in, the specific argument Evie and I have every time about whether the water is boiling enough before the pasta goes in, when I open the fridge for the milk.
No milk.
I stand in front of the open fridge and look at the shelf where the milk is supposed to be and confirm, with the particular exhaustion of a person who has had an extremely full day, that I forgot it at the grocery store this morning.
I was distracted this morning. I was distracted because of the feeling at the back of my chest that has been there for six days, and that has a name I'm not using.
"Bad word," Evie says from the counter.
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it very quietly," she says. "Under your breath. I have excellent hearing."
"You have inconvenient hearing."
"Same thing in this apartment." She props her chin back in her hand. "What's wrong?"
"I forgot the milk."
She sighs with the comprehensive world-weariness of someone who has seen this before. "You always forget one thing."
"I do not always—"
"Last week it was the butter," Mr. Roberts offers, pleasantly, from his stool.
"Last week it was the butter," Evie confirms.
"I'm going to step out," I say. "Two minutes."
"I'll watch the water," Evie says.
"Don't let it boil without me."
"I won't."
"Mr. Roberts—"
"I'll watch her watch the water," he says. "Go."
I grab my keys and my jacket from the hook, pull the door open, and nearly walk directly into the milk.
It is sitting on the floor outside my door. A full carton, the right kind — whole milk, the brand Evie likes — and beside it, folded once, a small piece of paper.
I stare at it.
My hand shakes when I pick it up. I notice the shaking the way I notice things I can't afford to react to — distantly, clinically, filing it under address this later. The carton is cold in my palm. I pick up the note with two fingers and unfold it.
Five words, in handwriting that is precise and unhurried and takes up exactly as much space as it needs to:
You're welcome. — Moya Sasha.
The door is still open behind me. I can hear Mr. Roberts saying something to Evie about the water, her response, the ordinary domestic sounds of my apartment going about its evening without knowing that I am standing in the hallway with a carton of milk in one hand and a note in the other, and my heart doing something that I am going to have to deal with later.
I fold the note. Put it in my jacket pocket. Pick up the milk. Turn around.
Close the door.
"Got it," I say, and my voice is perfect — even, ordinary, carrying nothing. I set the milk on the counter and go back to the pasta water and do not look at Evie's face to see if she's reading me, because if she's reading me, looking at her will confirm it.
"That was fast," she says.
"Close store," I say.
She is quiet for a moment in a way that means she's decided not to push it. I love her for it. I also know she hasn't dropped it, she's filed it, she'll come back to it later in that patient, methodical way she has of returning to things she's set aside.
Not tonight. I need her not to tonight.
Dinner is loud in the small apartment, the way dinner gets when Mr. Roberts is there — he has stories the way other people have furniture, built up over decades, filling every available space, and Evie has learned to love them, which means she asks questions, which means the stories expand, which means nobody has to fill the silence themselves.
I am grateful for this in a specific and bone-deep way that makes me uneasy.
I eat my pasta and contribute where required, laugh when it's warranted, and try not to think about the note in my jacket pocket or the handwriting on it or the name it used, which is not a name anyone in this city has any business knowing.
Moya Sasha. My Sasha.
Alexandra. The name I was born with, the name I had carried for years before I filed it away along with everything else that I’d once been and became Alex Riggs in a bank branch in Pilsen with four hundred and twelve dollars and a story I'd rehearsed enough times to believe.
Nobody calls me Alexandra. Nobody in this city even knows it exists.
He knows.
He knows and he bought milk and left it outside my door and wrote a note like a man who finds all of this charming rather than alarming, like he's not the Pakhan of the Russian mafia who watched his cousin shoot a man in his nightclub and then spent six days following me to the grocery store, and I am sitting at my kitchen counter eating pasta with an twelve-year-old and my building manager and I am not, absolutely not, thinking about an alley and a hand at my waist and a mouth on my neck.
He knows where I live.
He's known from the beginning. He was the one who came to my apartment — the old friend, the math tutor, the man who charmed Mr. Roberts and helped Evie with her homework, and told her he was moving in across the hall.
He's been across the hall. He's been watching from across the hall for however many days it's been since I came home in his jacket, and he left milk outside my door and called me Moya Sasha like it was a small, private joke between two people who know each other, and we do not know each other, and he is the most dangerous man I have ever stood six inches away from, and I need to figure out what to do about him before he figures out what to do about me.
And he cannot know about Evie.
Except he already does. He already does, he's already met her, he helped her with long division and she's waiting for him to come back, and if he knows my real name then he knows enough to know everything else, and the thing I am trying very hard not to let happen in my chest is happening anyway, that specific cold expansion of fear that I haven't felt in three years, that I thought I'd left far enough behind.
"Alex," Evie says.
I look up.
She and Mr. Roberts are both looking at me. I've missed something. "Sorry," I say. "What?"
"Mr. Roberts asked if you wanted more pasta," she says, with her eyes doing the thing where she's asking a different question than her mouth is.
"No, thank you," I say. "I'm good."
She holds my eyes for one beat longer than necessary. Then she goes back to her dinner, and I go back to mine, and Mr. Roberts resumes the story, and nobody says anything else about it.
Mr. Roberts leaves at eight-thirty, the way he always does on school nights, with his container of leftover soup and his warm, unhurried goodbye and his hand briefly on the top of Evie's head before he goes.
I lock both locks behind him and listen to his footsteps move down the hall, and I stand at the door for a moment with my forehead almost against the wood.
Across the hall. 4D.
I don't look at the peephole.
"Bath," I call, and go to do the dishes.
Evie comes out of the bathroom in her pajamas with her hair damp and her face scrubbed clean, and she looks young enough that it physically hurts to look at her sometimes — the gap between the face she puts on and the one underneath it, the one that belongs to an twelve-year-old who should be worried about homework and friends and which book to read next, not about running and locks and men who leave notes outside doors.
She climbs into bed, and I sit on the edge of it the way I always do, the ritual of it, these specific few minutes at the end of the day that belong only to us.
"You're worried about something," she says.
"I'm always worried about something."
"More than usual," she says. "Since the other night."
Since the other night. Since the club, she means, though she doesn't know about the club, and she connects it to the feeling in the apartment without knowing the specifics, because she has been reading me for three years, and she is very good at it. "I'm okay," I say.
"Alex."
"I promise I'm okay," I say. "I'm handling it."
She looks at me with those old eyes in her young face. "Is it like before?" she asks. "Like when we had to—" She stops. "Like before."
"No," I say, and I mean it, and I also don't fully mean it, and she hears both. "It's different."
She's quiet for a moment. "I don't want to move again," she says. Not an outburst like yesterday, just a fact stated quietly, which is somehow more weighty than the outburst.
"I know." I smooth her hair back. "I don't either."
"You promised."
"I know I promised." I look at her face — this face I would set myself on fire for, this kid who packed a bag and kept it under her mattress for fourteen nights and walked through a back door in the dark without making a sound. "I'm keeping it."
She considers me. "The man who came to help with math," she says carefully. "He was the friend, wasn't he. The real one."
I go very still. "What makes you say that?"
"Because you wouldn't be looking at the door like that if he was just a mistake," she says.
"And because he knew things about the math that most people don't know, and he wasn't surprised about anything, which is what people who know a lot about a lot of things look like.
" She pulls her covers up. "And because you're wearing the same face you wear when something is complicated. "
I look at my hands for a moment. This child. This extraordinary, perceptive, terrifying child.
"He's complicated," I say. Which is the truest thing I've said all evening.
"Is he dangerous?"
The honest answer is yes. The honest answer is that he is the most dangerous thing that has come near us in three years, more dangerous than the Koshkins looking for us, because at least I know what the Koshkins want from us — we are property, we are something that was taken, they want us back out of pride rather than anything that resembles feeling.
Nikita, however, is a different category entirely, and the note in my pocket with my real name on it is evidence that he is a category I don't have a protocol for.
"I'm handling it," I say.
She looks at me for a long, serious moment. Then she nods, the small nod of someone who has decided to trust a decision they can't see the whole of yet. "Okay," she says.
I lean down and kiss her forehead. She doesn't pull away, which means she needed it, which means she's more worried than she's letting on, which means we are two people sitting in this small apartment managing our fear quietly so the other one doesn't have to carry it, and if there's a more accurate description of us than that, I haven't found it.
"I love you," I say.
"Love you too," she says. "Both locks tonight."
"Both locks," I confirm.
I stand up. Move to the door. Turn the light off.
"Alex." Her voice is quiet in the dark.
"Yeah?"
"Whatever it is." A pause. "We've gotten through worse."
I stand in her doorway for a moment and look at the shape of her in the dark, twelve years old, not mine by blood or paperwork or any measure the world would accept, mine by three years of bus routes and shelter rooms and copied keys and promises kept against uncertain futures.
"Yeah," I say. "We have."
I pull her door almost closed, stand in the hallway, put my hand in my jacket pocket, and feel the folded note between my fingers.
Moya Sasha.
He knows my name. He knows my door. He knows about Evie, or knows enough, which is the same thing, and I am standing in my hallway at eight forty-five in the evening trying to decide if the most dangerous man I've met in three years is a threat I need to run from or a complication I need to manage, and the problem — the real problem, the one I've been not-thinking about since an alley behind a café this afternoon — is that some part of me doesn't want to do either.
Some part of me wants to open the door across the hall and tell him he knows my name wrong.
It's Yarina, I would say. Not Alexandra. Yarina Koshkin, twenty-seven years old, formerly of a world not so different from yours, currently of apartment 4C with a child who isn't mine and a life built from nothing and a promise I intend to keep.
I pull up the camera feeds on my phone instead. Front door, hallway, Evie's room. I check them in that order, the way I always do, the same ritual, the same sequence, and then I get to the hallway feed, and I stop.
The door to 4D is open.
Not wide — just an inch, maybe two, the specific amount that a door is open when someone on the other side of it is standing close and not bothering to hide that they are.
The hallway is dark, and the gap in the door is darker, and I cannot see anything through it, but I don't need to see anything through it because I can feel it the same way I could feel eyes on me in the grocery store this morning and the morning before that.
He's there.
He's been there this whole time, on the other side of that door, and he knows I'm looking at the feed right now, and he knows I can see the door, and he left it open anyway — not by accident, not through carelessness, because this man does not do anything by accident or through carelessness.
He left it open because he wanted me to know.
My phone screen goes dark in my hand.
I stand in my hallway in the dark, and I look at my front door, and I think about what is six feet away from it, and I think about Moya Sasha in precise unhurried handwriting, and I think about an alley and a hand at my waist and a mouth on my neck and the specific thing he said when he pulled back.
It makes it very difficult to resist ruining you completely.
I check both locks. Then the doorknob. Then I go to bed and lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and listen, without meaning to, for any sound from across the hall.
I don't hear anything.
That's almost worse.