I step back and let him in because the alternative is having a conversation about groceries in the hallway, which is not a conversation I have the energy for, and also because Evie is at the kitchen counter doing homework and she has already looked up and seen him and the expression on her face is the specific one she gets when something she decided was going to be good turns out to be good, and I am not going to be the thing that takes that from her.
He puts the groceries away. He knows where things go, which I have tell myself is because he has been in this apartment and pays attention. Not because he has surveillance in it. Because how can I trust him when he says we don’t have to run, if I can’t trust that he took the surveillance equipment out?
I watch him open the right cabinet for the pasta and the right shelf for the yogurt, and I feel the specific feeling of someone watching their life be understood by another person, which is a feeling I have not had in thirty-seven months and which sits in my chest in a way I cannot categorize as entirely comfortable.
"The cabinet under the sink is loose," he says, closing it. "The hinge on the left side. I can fix it."
"Mr. Roberts will fix it," I say.
"Mr. Roberts's hip has been bothering him since Monday," he says. "He told me this morning. I’ll fix it."
I look at him. "You spoke to Mr. Roberts this morning?"
"He was in the lobby," Victor says. "He offered me coffee."
"Of course he did."
"It was good coffee."
Evie looks up from her homework. "He makes it with cardamom," she says. "It's really good." She looks back down. "Victor, can you look at this when you're done with the cabinet? I don't understand the question."
"What subject?" he says, already moving toward the cabinet under the sink.
"History," she says. "It's about primary sources and I don't understand what they're actually asking."
"Finish the question you're on," he says. "I'll look at it in a minute."
She goes back to her homework. He crouches in front of the cabinet and examines the hinge with the focused attention of a man who has decided something needs fixing and has allocated the relevant resources to fixing it, and I stand in the kitchen of my small apartment watching the Pakhan of the Russian mafia crouch under my sink to look at a cabinet hinge while my daughter does history homework three feet away.
"I'll need a screwdriver," he says.
"Third drawer," I say, before I've decided to say it.
He opens the third drawer and takes out the screwdriver, and I go sit on the other stool at the counter and look at Evie's homework, and do not think about the fact that I knew which drawer the screwdriver was in; neither of us commented on that.
He comes back on Thursday with a bag of hardware from the building supply place two streets over and fixes the cabinet hinge, and then the loose step on the third-floor landing.
On Friday he is in the lobby when I come home from my café shift, talking to Mr. Roberts who is telling him about the building when it was first renovated, 1987, the original tenants, the woman on the second floor who kept three cats and a complicated relationship with the truth, and Victor is listening with his arms folded and his weight settled and his expression doing the thing where it isn't quite warm but it is paying complete attention, which functions like warmth even if it isn't exactly that.
He sees me come in and nods, once, without interrupting Mr. Roberts, and I nod back and take the stairs up and stand in my apartment and think about what it means that we have developed such an easy existence, that there is a specific register of acknowledgment between us that exists separately from everything else, a small domestic fluency that arrived without being negotiated.
I check the camera feeds, make dinner, and then call Evie in from her room and we eat and she tells me about her day andabout a girl in her math class who is starting to sit near her at lunch, not Sophie, someone different, someone who apparently also finds long division more logical when it's explained correctly, which is something Evie communicated to this girl in the particular way Evie communicates things she has decided are useful, and the girl's name is June and she has a dog.
"A real one?" I say.
"A very real one," Evie says. "She showed me a picture. It's enormous. She said it thinks it's a lap dog."
"What kind?"
"Bernese mountain dog." She considers her food as she pushes it around with her fork. "Victor would probably like that kind of dog."
I look at her. She looks at her food with the neutrality of a twelve-year-old who has said something she intended to say and is performing innocence about it.
"He seems like a dog person," she says. "Not a small dog. A big one."
"We're not getting a dog," I say.
"I know," she says. "I was just saying."
