Chapter 10 #2
I lift my hand and make a small circle motion with two fingers. Maksim responds to the signal instantly, pushing away from the kiosk before wandering through the crowd toward us.
Alex notices, following my gaze, her eyes narrowing. “Has he been there the whole time?”
I nod.
A series of emotions shifts across her face. Irritation, relief, then irritation again. Evie, however, looks delighted.
“Is he going to be weird about going with me?” she asks.
“I think Maksim is professionally incapable of being weird,” I tell her with a small smile.
Maksim reaches us, his expression neutral, attention moving between the three of us. Then, looking at me inquisitively, “Boss?”
“Evie wants to see the lights display,” I tell him. “Stay with her.”
Alex looks up at him with a slight grimace, looking him up and down. “Don’t loiter like a terrifying shadow, though. Try to — blend in.”
He blinks once.
“You know, walk beside her,” Alex clarifies. “Where I can see you both, and other people won’t assume you're following her.”
He nods. “Understood.”
Evie gives Alex a look. “I was going to be where you could see me anyways.”
“And now I’ll be able to see you, with a large adult nearby. Even better.”
Evies sighs dramatically, then looks at Maksim. “Do you like lights?”
“Not particularly,” he says.
Evie considers that for a moment. “Do you like hot chocolate?”
“Yes.”
“I can work with that,” Evie says with a smile.
Maksim looks at me, raising an eyebrow slightly. I can practically hear him asking, ‘Is this truly why you brought me?’
I nod, and he accepts his fate.
Evie goes with the enthusiasm of a child who has gotten what she wanted, which is to leave the two adults alone. Which I am beginning to suspect she engineered, and apparently so did Alex, because the moment Evie is out of immediate earshot, she turns to me fully and says, "She likes you."
"Does she?" I ask nonchalantly, “I hadn’t noticed.”
"She doesn't like people easily."
"I know." I admit.
She pulls her scarf tighter against the cold and looks at the lake for a moment.
"You're dangerous," she says. Not accusatory.
Just factual, the way she states things, she has decided are true and doesn't need me to confirm.
"Whatever this is, whatever you're doing — you're the most dangerous thing that's come near us in three years, and I have spent a lot of time and energy keeping us away from danger, Victor.
" She looks at me with a worried look. "I know exactly what you are. "
"And?" I say.
She holds my gaze for a moment. The wind comes off the lake and moves her hair, and she doesn't look away. "And I still like it when you're around," she admits quietly. "I don't know what to do with that."
"You don't have to do anything with it," I say. "Let me do something with it."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she nods, once, small, the nod of someone who has made a decision they're not entirely comfortable with and has decided to make it anyway. "Ten minutes," she says. "Then we find Evie."
"Ten minutes," I agree.
We stand at the railing with the grey lake in front of us and the cold coming off it, and our shoulders almost touching, and neither of us says anything for a while, which is its own kind of conversation, and I find that I am content in a way I haven't been in a long time.
Evie finds the Ferris wheel before we find her.
She is standing in front of it with her neck craned back, looking up at it when we come around the corner, her chocolate stick gone, her breath making small clouds in the cold air.
Maksim stands a few feet away with a paper cup of hot chocolate in one hand, and his eyes scanning their surroundings.
She turns when she hears us, and the look on her face when she sees us side by side is pure, smug satisfaction.
"Can we go on?" she asks. "All three of us?"
Alex looks at me. I look at the Ferris wheel. It is cold, and the view from the top will be gray lake in every direction, and despite my desire to decline, I find myself agreeing.
We go on. Evie sits between us in the gondola, which I suspect was her intention from the moment she suggested the outing, and as we rise above the pier she leans forward to look out and the city spreads itself below us and she makes a small sound of genuine pleasure that is nothing like the careful controlled sounds she usually makes and everything like what she actually is underneath all of it — a child who wants things, who is allowed to want things, and for this specific moment, is able to be simply happy.
I don't look at the view. I watch her look at the view.
At the top, when the gondola stops its slow rotation, and we are suspended above everything with the lake grey and vast on one side and the city lit and sprawling on the other, Evie turns to me with her eyes still bright from joy and says, "She worries about everything, you know."
"I know," I say.
"She thinks I don't notice, but I do." She looks at Alex, who is watching the city, pretending not to listen. "She worries about me the most. She always has." A pause. "Even when she didn't have to. Even before she was—"
She stops. Look at her hands. Something moves across her face that is careful and private, a door partially opened and then reconsidered and shut.
"Before she was what?" I say, quietly. Carefully.
Evie looks at me. Then something in her expression— not carelessness, not accident, but a specific decision, the kind she makes when she has decided to trust something even knowing the risk.
"Before she was my mom," she says. "She wasn't always.
My mom, I mean." She says it simply, like a fact that has been true long enough to have lost its edges.
"But she is now. She's the only one I've ever had that counted. "
I look at her for a moment. Then I look at Alex, who has gone very still beside us, her eyes on the city, her jaw doing the thing it does when she is managing something and not letting it manage her.
"She's very good at it," I say. To Evie. Meaning every word.
Evie nods, once, agreeing completely and glad to have it confirmed. Then she turns back to the view, and the gondola begins its slow descent, and nobody says anything else, and the city comes back up around us, and the pier appears below, and the cold is immediate again when we step out.
Alex doesn't say a word; she doesn’t even look at me. I don't make her engage, giving her space. At least until it’s time to leave, then I insist on giving them a ride home. After all, we are all going to the same place, so why not enjoy the heater in the car?
On the drive home Evie falls asleep again against the window in the back seat, which she does every time she is in a car for more than ten minutes, and Alex is in the front this time, beside Maksim, and I am behind her, and the city moves past and I look at the back of her head and I think about what Evie said and what she didn't say and the very specific way she said before she was my mom.
She wasn't always.
I take out my phone, tipping it away from the others just enough to ensure no one can read my screen. Careful not to be obvious. Find out who she really is, I text David. Not the cover. Underneath it. Everything.
He responds in thirty seconds. Working on it.