“I don’t know,” he says finally.
Which means he has thought of it too.
I take another breath and realize my hand is shaking.
I should be talking.
That’s the reason I came here. The guard. The tattoo. The shooting. My father. His father. All the things that feel rotten now that I can finally see the shape of them.
Instead, I’m standing in Roman’s kitchen with vodka warming my throat and his attention on me so completely that every sensible thought I had on the drive over is starting to come apart.
He tells me to start from the beginning, so I do.
I tell him about the guard. About never having seen him before. About the way he spoke to me like he belonged there already. About the tattoo under the cuff and the picture I took and how my skin went cold the second I saw it.
Roman listens without interrupting. He asks questions when he needs to. Short ones. Precise ones. Times, places, what the man said exactly, whether he looked nervous, whether anyone else was nearby. Mikhail disappears somewhere down the hall, giving us privacy without pretending It isn’t deliberate.
By the time I’m done, the vodka is half gone and so is my temper.
“So what now?” I ask. “Do I go back there and sit at breakfast like everything is normal?”
Roman leans one hand on the counter and looks at me. “No.”
“No?” I echo. “That’s a very comforting answer.”
“You came here because you know It isn’t normal.”
“I came here because men with guns nearly killed my children.”
His face changes a little at that. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Enough for me. “And because part of you already suspects your father knows more than he should,” he says.
“I don’t know what I think about my father,” I say.
“That’s not true.”
I laugh once, sharp and humorless. “Oh, you know me now?”
“I know that look.”
“What look?”
“The one you get when you already know the answer and are trying to decide whether you can live with it.”
I set the glass down too hard. “You don’t get to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Stand there and read me like I’m the easy part of this.”
His mouth hardens. “You’re not the easy part.”
“Good,” I say. “Because I’m getting very tired of men deciding they understand me.”
He pushes away from the counter then, slow and controlled, and the movement changes the air instantly. We are no longer discussing guards and shell casings and fathers. We are in thedangerous place again, the one we always seem to reach without meaning to and never leave cleanly.
“I’m not deciding anything,” he says. “I’m looking at what’s in front of me.”
“And what’s that?”
