"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 abouteverything that’s happened. I think aboutty moyosaid 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 neverbeen 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 saidmoya,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, andthat 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, andty moyoagainst my skin, and the way he saidI don'twhen 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.
Chapter Fourteen
Alex
Victor shows up on Wednesday with groceries. Not a gesture — not flowers or wine or something that announces itself as romantic and requires a response. Groceries.
Specific groceries, which is the part that stops me in the doorway when I open it to find him in the hallway with two bags from the store three blocks away: the right yogurt, the one Evie will eat and not the two she won't, the coffee I buy when it's on sale and the brand I actually want when it isn't, the pasta — rigatoni, not penne — and the whole milk, the brand, the size, as if he looked at my fridge and memorized it, which he did, because of course he did, because this is Victor and Victor memorizes things the way other people breathe.
"I was passing the store," he says. Something moves at the edge of his mouth. "May I come in?"
