"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 underaddress 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 peoplehave 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 meMoya Sashalike 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.
