"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 blueeyes 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 thedistance 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?"
