Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Alex
The scrape is on her left knee, which she shows me with the matter-of-fact precision of a child who has decided the injury does not warrant the level of panic it produced, and she is correct, and I am aware that she is correct, and I cannot stop checking it anyway.
"It's fine," she says. "I caught my knee on the nightstand when the lamp went. It's barely anything."
"Let me see."
"You do see it."
"Let me see it better." I turn her knee slightly toward the light and look at the scrape — shallow, already beginning to dry at the edges, the kind of thing that stings and looks worse than it actually is — and I breathe through the feeling of a person whose body has been running on adrenaline for the last forty minutes.
That adrenaline has nowhere useful to go, so it simply stays, humming in my chest, looking for somewhere to land.
"First aid kit," I say, and stand up.
"We don't need the first aid kit for this," Evie says.
"We have a first aid kit," I say, "and we are going to use it."
She sighs with exhaustion, "Fine."
I go to the bathroom and open the cabinet under the sink where the first aid kit lives — a good one, properly stocked, the kind that has actual gauze and proper antiseptic rather than three old bandaids and a packet of something expired, because I have never been able to allow myself the kind of life where the first aid kit is not properly stocked — and when I stand up Victor is in the doorway.
I hadn't heard him follow us across the hall. I hadn't heard him come in, which means I left my door open in my panic, which means I need to go back and lock it, which means there are seventeen things I need to address, and I am standing in my bathroom holding a first aid kit.
My hands have started shaking now that the immediate fear has passed, which is the way it always works: the shaking comes after, when the body decides it's safe enough to fall apart a little.
He looks at my hands. He doesn't say anything.
He reaches out and takes the first aid kit from me, not roughly, not with any particular production, just takes it the way you take something from someone whose hands are not working correctly, and he turns and goes back to Evie's room, and I stand in the bathroom for a moment and press my palms flat against the sink and breathe.
One. Two. Three.
When I come back to the room, Victor is sitting on the edge of Evie's bed with the first aid kit open on his knee, and Evie is watching him with an expression I recognize — the one she gives things she has decided are interesting enough to override her usual caution.
He has the antiseptic and a cotton pad, and he is looking at her knee with the same quality of attention he gives everything, which is to say complete and unhurried.
"This is going to sting," he says. He applies it, and she makes a small sound through her nose and doesn't flinch, which he notices, and something in his expression does a thing I cannot fully read from the doorway. "Good," he says, simply.
"Did you do that on purpose?" she asks. "Say it would sting so I'd brace for it instead of being surprised?"
"Yes," he says.
She considers that for a moment. "That's actually a good technique."
"I've done this a time or two," he says.
"Patching people up?"
"Among other things." He selects a bandage from the kit, the right size, and applies it with the same precision he applies to everything, smoothing the edges down. "Done."
Evie looks at her knee. Then she looks at him. "You're good at that."
"I've had practice," he says.
"On yourself or on other people?"
He looks at her, and the thing at the edge of his expression does it again — that almost-something that is warmer than what his face usually allows.
"Both," he says.
She nods, satisfied, in the way she nods when she's received an honest answer and has filed it accordingly.
She leans back against her pillow, pulls the blanket up, and looks at me in the doorway with the specific eyes she has for when she's decided something about a situation that she's not going to say out loud.
"I'm actually pretty tired," she says. "From being at school this morning. It was exhausting."
"You were only there for three hours," I protested.
"Three very exhausting hours," she says. "I think I'm going to sleep for a while."
Victor closes the first aid kit and stands, and I can see in the deliberate unhurry of it that he is giving me the chance to say something to Evie, to do whatever the ritual is that happens when she goes to sleep, without making it a thing.
He moves to the doorway and I move to her bed and I pull the blanket up the last inch and look at her face — the pale of it, the dark eyes, the specific quality of a twelve-year-old who is tired and slightly unwell and has found herself in a situation she is actively choosing not to ask questions about yet, because she has decided to trust me with it.
"Sleep," I say.
She closes her eyes, and I watch her for a moment.
Then I turn off her lamp — the one on the other side of the bed — and pull her door most of the way closed and go back to the living room where Victor is standing with his hands in his pockets looking at the camera in the corner by the front door with an expression of someone now viewing an object from a different angle.
"She's fine," I say.
He turns. "You aren’t."
"I'm fine now."
"You were shaking in the bathroom," he says. Not an accusation. Just a fact, stated the way he states everything, because he has been paying attention, and he doesn't pretend he hasn't.
"I know," I say. "That's what happens after — the shaking comes after."
I look at the kitchen, look around my apartment. My small, old, insufficient apartment with its radiator that complains about winter, its bathroom window tape that I replace every two weeks, and its camera feeds.
"I've been operating on high alert for a long time," I say. " When it gets tripped, my nervous system has opinions."
"It's allowed to," he says.
I look at him. He is leaning against my bookshelf with his arms folded and his jacket on and the first aid kit on the counter behind him, where he set it when he came out, and he looks — he looks like someone who belongs in the room, which has always been the thing that unsettles me most about him.
Not the danger, not the organization, not the gun I know he carries and has never produced in my presence.
The way he fits into the space around me like he was designed for it, like the apartment and Evie and the first aid kit and the lamp on the floor are all simply circumstances he has assessed and adapted to with the same total competence he brings to everything else.
His violence has never scared me. I grew up around violence.
I know what it looks like and how it moves and what it costs, and Victor's version of it is particular and controlled and in the time I have known him, has never once been pointed anywhere near Evie or me.
But this — the way he sat on the edge of her bed and told her it would sting and smoothed the bandage down with those hands — this is the thing that gets in under my defenses and stays there, and I don't know what to do with it.
"You should go," I say.
He doesn't move. "I'm going to tell you something first."
"Victor—"
"The man in the blue coat," he says. "He was Koshkin's.
Someone pointed them at you, and I know who, I am handling it.
You don't need to know the details right now.
What you need to know is that I am between you and whatever is coming, and I am going to stay between you and it, and you are not running again. "
He looks at me steadily. "Both of you. I am telling you so you stop thinking about calculating an exit strategy. You don’t need it this time."
I look at him for a long moment. The very idea of not having an exit strategy scares me; he’s asking me to trust him on a level that I’ve never trusted anyone. Besides Evie, that is.
"You can't promise that," I say. Same words as before. Same apartment.
"I am promising that, and I can.” He says firmly, “I just need you to trust me on this.”
I look at him. He looks back. The apartment is quiet and small around us, and Evie is in the next room, and the city is outside, and the man in the blue coat is gone for now, and here he is standing in my living room telling me not to run again. And I want so badly to believe him.
"I’ll try," I say finally, “that’s the best I can promise. Is to try.”
He looks at me for a moment longer. Then he nods, picks up the first aid kit from the counter, and sets it on the shelf where it belongs before moving to the door.
"Lock it," he says. “I’ll be across the hall. You’re not alone anymore.”
He slips out the door, closing it quietly behind him, and I lock all the locks.
The deadbolt, the second one, the doorknob.
Then I stand in the hallway and listen the way I always listen.
I hear his door open and close across the hall, the normal cadence of the building settling, and the city outside and Evie breathing in the next room, slow and even, already asleep.
I go to the kitchen and make tea I don't particularly want and drink half of it standing at the counter, and I think about everything that’s happened.
I think about ty moyo said against my skin, and what it means that he said it, and what it means that I am standing in my kitchen at whatever time it is in the afternoon, making tea instead of doing the thing I know I need to do.
I put the mug down. Retreating to my bedroom.
I close the door, go to the far side of the bed, the side against the wall, and I crouch down and press on the third floorboard from the baseboard, the one that was loose when we moved in and that I secured myself with a screwdriver and a piece of hardware from the building supply closet, secured in a specific way that means it comes up when you press the right corner and not otherwise.
It comes up.
The bag is where I left it, in the space beneath — compact, already packed, the same configuration I have repacked it twice in three years, and each time told myself I wouldn't need to use it.
Emergency documents, two sets, one for me and one for Evie, both clean.
The same amount of cash I left with thirty-seven months ago, built back up over two years of careful saving.
A phone, prepaid, charged. The photograph from the pharmacy booth, which I have moved from coat lining to bag to box and back to bag over three years, and have never been able to leave behind.
I don't take anything out of it.
I just look at it for a moment — this bag, this small compact evidence of what I know about the world and what I have never been able to stop knowing — and then I close the floorboard back down and press the corner until it clicks, and I sit on the edge of my bed, and I look at the wall.
He said I'm not running again.
He said it like it was already decided, like the outcome existed and we were simply working toward it, the way he says everything he means.
And I sat in his apartment, and I told him the truth, and he looked at me with those pale eyes, and he said moya, and I believed him, in the moment, in the way that moments make things true that aren't necessarily true outside of them.
But the bag is under the floorboard. And the man in the blue coat was only three blocks behind me.
And Nikita Koshkin has been looking for us for thirty-seven months and does not stop looking, and I made a promise to a twelve-year-old, and that promise is the only thing that has ever been more important than anything else, and it will continue to be more important than anything else, including a man with pale eyes who smoothed a bandage down and promised to stay between us and whatever is coming.
I believe him, I think. As much as I am capable of believing anyone. But the bag stays where it is. Just in case.
Because I have learned, over thirty-seven months and four cities and one copied key and four hundred and twelve dollars, that the people who love you and mean it and would do anything for you are not always enough to stop the thing that's coming, and that the only thing that is always enough is the thing you packed yourself and know where to find in the dark.
I go check on Evie one more time. She is exactly where I left her, breathing slow and even, the blanket pulled up, the lamp off, her left knee with its small, precise bandage catching the light from the hallway.
I stand in her doorway for a long moment, and I think about the bag under the floorboard and the man across the hall and the promise I made her and the man in the blue coat who was three blocks behind me this morning and is somewhere in this city right now.
I close her door and go to bed.
I lie in the dark and I think about Victor's hands smoothing the bandage down, and ty moyo against my skin, and the way he said I don't when I told him people say things, and I think about all of that and I think about the bag under the floorboard with the documents and the cash and the photograph, and I understand, lying in the dark at whatever hour this is, that both of those things are true simultaneously and that I don't yet know which one is going to matter more.
I think I might have to disappear overnight.
I think that even now, even with him across the hall and his promise still sitting in the room where he said it, I think I might still have to take that bag out from under that floorboard and wake Evie up in the dark and run.
I hate that I think that.
I hate that thirty-seven months of surviving has made that thought more instinctive than trust, more available than hope, more present than the feeling of his mouth on my skin an hour ago, which I am trying very hard not to think about and am failing.