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 areall 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 saidbefore 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.
Chapter Eleven
Victor
David calls at six in the morning, as usual, and I am already awake. A habit that formed sometime in my twenties when sleep stopped being something my body committed to fully, and became instead a series of shallow intervals between projects that don't stop just because the lights are off. I am at the window with coffee when the phone rings, and I answer it on the first ring because he only calls at six in the morning when he has something.
"Talk," I say.
"Her name is Yarina," David says. "Yarina Koshkin."
The coffee cup stops halfway to my mouth.
“Excuse me?" I say. "Say that again,"
"Yarina Koshkin. Twenty-seven years old. Born in Moscow, raised in Chicago from the age of four when Nikita Koshkinrelocated the family." I can hear him at his keyboard, the specific rhythm of it, pulling threads as he speaks. "From what I have gathered she was treated as a personal attendant for the family despite being blood relation, which in the Koshkin world means she was available for whatever was needed and had very little say in the parameters of that arrangement."
I set the coffee down.
"And what about the child," I say. “Is she hers?”
"Evangeline Koshkin." A pause, the kind David uses when what comes next requires more care than the rest. "Illegitimate daughter of Nikita Koshkin. The mother is not in the picture — she died when Evie was two, cause of death listed as an accident, and I am not convinced by that listing. Evie was raised in the household. Nikita acknowledged her as his but gave her no formal status, no legal protection, no standing within the family structure." Another pause. "She was, by every account I can find, completely at his mercy. And Nikita Koshkin is not a man who has ever been troubled by mercy."
"The scars," I say.
"Yes," David says. "That would explain them."
I stand at the window and look at the city and let that sit for a moment — the full weight of it, Evie's left hand on the table, the silver lines across her skin that I saw and said nothing about.
A child. A child in that house with Nikita Koshkin and whatever he decided mercy was not required for, and Yarina — Alex — watching it happen, close enough to see all of it and unable to stop it through any channel available to someone in her position, and then deciding to stop it the only way left.
She took her.
"Three years ago," I put it all together, guessing the rest. "She took the child and ran."
"Correct. Both of them disappeared from the Koshkin household thirty-seven months ago. Nikita reported it as a kidnapping — his daughter taken by a former employee." David's voice is careful and even, the voice he uses when he is delivering facts that have uneasy edges. "There's a file with the Chicago PD that went nowhere because Nikita doesn't trust police enough to give them anything useful, and because Alex became skilled at hiding after that night nobody found a thread to pull." He pauses. "Until now."
"How did you find it?"
"A pharmacy photograph," he says. "Six months before they ran. There's a transaction record — a photo booth, a pharmacy on the west side, two people. I found the pharmacy, found the booth, found the transaction, and from there it was a question of cross-referencing the image with Koshkin family records that aren't exactly public but aren't exactly secured either." A pause. "She looks different. She changed her hair, she's older, she carriesherself differently than she did in the household photographs. But it's her. No question."
"And the child?"
"Evie was nine when they left. The photographs from the Koshkin household are sparse — Nikita didn't document her existence with any particular warmth — but the ones I found are proof enough. Same eyes, same bone structure. It's her." A pause. "Victor, the household records from that period. I pulled what I could find. Evie was kept out of school until she was seven, no medical records before that age, no documentation of any kind. She existed inside that house and nowhere else." He stops. "The things that requires someone to be doing to a child to make that choice — keeping her invisible, keeping her unrecorded?—"
