She was not just saying. She was doing the thing she has been doing since the Navy Pier Ferris wheel, the thing where she introduces Victor into a conversation through a side door and waits to see what I do with it, which is a technique I recognize because she learned it from me, and I am choosing not to comment on the irony.
"Eat your food," I say. She eats. Smiling at it, just slightly, and I let her have the moment of victory.
By Saturday, I understand what is actually happening to me. It starts ordinarily. I have the morning off, and Evie sleeps late the way she does on weekends, reclaiming the sleep she loses during the week to early alarms and the specific effort of being twelve in a new school in a new city with a history she can't fully explain to anyone. I make coffee and sit on the couch with it and read the four pages of the book I have been reading for two months, and I actually retain them this time, which feels significant. Victor knocks at ten.
Three knocks, which is Mr. Roberts's pattern, which Victor has apparently adopted, and I stand and look at the door for a moment before I open it. He is in the hallway with a toolbox — an actual toolbox, not the building's, something that belongs to him, quality and well-used — and he has his jacket off, and his sleeves rolled, and he says, "The bathroom window seal. Mr. Roberts said it's been an issue."
"I've been managing it," I say.
"With tape," he says.
"With tape," I confirm. "It works."
"I'll do it properly," he says. "It'll take twenty minutes."
I step back and let him in because the tape has been an issue since November and the window lets in cold in a specific way that I have been compensating for rather than solving because solving it requires tools I don't own and skills I haven't acquired, and Victor has the tools and apparently the skills and the twenty minutes, and I am practical above almost everything else, and this is practical.
He fixes the window seal in eighteen minutes. He does it without commentary, without making it an event, without requiring me to be grateful in any particular way that would create a debt between us. He just fixes the window, puts his tools back in the toolbox, washes his hands at the kitchen sink, and accepts the coffee I've put on the counter without being asked whether he wants it.
"Evie still asleep?" he says.
"Saturday," I say, by way of explanation.
He nods. He drinks the coffee. He looks out the kitchen window at the grey November Saturday, and I look at him, and think about all the things that have happened in the last few weeks. Undecided if I can handle things continuing this way or not. The falsity of domestic bliss, as it is.
His wanting I can manage. I have been managing wanting, mine and other people's, for thirty-seven months, and I know what it looks like and how it moves and how to stay one step ahead of it. But this — the cabinet hinge and the window seal and the right yogurt and the coffee and the history homework and the nod in the lobby — this is a different category entirely, and I do not have a protocol for it and I am standing in my kitchen realizing I don't have a protocol for it while he drinks his coffee and looks out the window at the grey Saturday.
"Evie has another friend," I say, because I need to say something that is not the thing I am thinking.
He looks at me. "The girl from math?"
"No, this one is from English. Her name is June," I say. "With the enormous dog."
"Good," he says. Simply. Like Evie having a friend is something he has also been wanting and is glad to hear about, and I realize with the specific clarity of someone receiving information they weren't prepared for that he has been wanting it, that somewhere in the weeks of groceries and cabinet hinges and history homework he has developed a stake in how Evie's life is going, and the stake is genuine, and it is not contingent on anything I do or don't do, and that is the most frightening thing I have encountered since the man in the blue coat.
Evie comes out of her room at ten forty-five in her pajamas with her hair doing what her hair does in the morning, which iswhatever it wants, and she sees Victor at the counter, and she says, "Oh, good, you're here.”
She goes to the cabinet and gets a bowl for cereal, and Victor moves slightly to the left to give her access to the refrigerator without being asked, "Did you fix the window?"
"Yes," he says with a smile.
"Good, it was cold," she says as she sits at the counter and eats her cereal. The three of us are in my small kitchen on a Saturday morning, and it is the most natural thing in the world.
I watch Evie eat her cereal. I watch Victor drink his coffee. I watch the specific ease between them, the way they occupy the same space without negotiating it, the way she hands him the spoon she's just rinsed without being asked because it belongs in the dish rack and he's standing next to the dish rack, the way he accepts it without comment, the way the apartment has made room for this, for him, in the way that spaces do when something has been present long enough that its absence would register.
And I understand what has been happening this week underneath the groceries, the cabinet hinge, and the window seal. I understand what Victor has been doing, slowly and without announcement, in my apartment, in my hallway, and at my kitchen counter. And I understand what I have been doing in response, which is allowing it, which is making coffee when he comes, and saying the third drawer when he needs a screwdriver, and stepping back when he enters, and not asking him to leave.
He is not the danger I thought he was. Or rather, he is that danger, still, completely, the Pakhan and the organization and the man in the club and all of it; none of that has changed. But the danger I should have been tracking, the one I didn't have a protocol for because I didn't know it existed, is this. The cabinet hinge. The right yogurt. The way Evie saysoh good, you're herelike it's the most ordinary sentence in the world.
And I realize, I am starting to trust him.
Not just to believe him when he says he is between us and whatever is coming, which I am holding carefully, at a distance, with both hands. But to trust him, which is the thing I dismantled and stored thirty-seven months ago because it had become a liability, and which has apparently been reassembling itself all week in the space between the third drawer and the right yogurt and the nod in the lobby, without my permission, without my awareness, while I was busy tracking his schedule and telling myself I wasn't.
And I do not know what to do with that, because the last time I trusted someone in the world I came from, running and a go-bag under a floorboard and a twelve-year-old who packs her own bag and keeps it where she can see it. But I do not know how to stop it, and I am standing in my kitchen on a Saturday morning watching Evie eat cereal, and Victor drink coffee, and I think that might be the most frightening thing I have learned about myself since any of this started.
Chapter Fifteen
Victor
