"So you're from Pennsylvania?"
I hold the smile. "Among other places."
Something passes between us—a recognition, maybe. An understanding. She knows I'm lying. I know she knows. But she also knows that the diner isn't worth whatever trouble I might bring, and she's been in this business long enough to recognize when someone is asking nicely instead of demanding.
"She works the graveyard shift," the woman says finally. "Eleven to seven. Comes in around ten-thirty, usually. If you want to see her, that's when you should come."
"Thank you." I reach into my wallet and pull out a hundred-dollar bill, placing it on the counter. "For your trouble."
"I don't want your money."
"Take it anyway. Consider it an investment in good will."
I turn and walk toward the door, but something catches my eye. A photo on the wall, near the register. A staff photo—the kind of thing that diners put up to pretend they're a family. Half a dozen people in matching aprons, standing in front of the counter, smiling at the camera.
And there she is.
Monika.
She's standing in the back row, between the cook and a waitress I don't recognize. She's young—younger than I expected, maybe early twenties—with dark hair pulled back from her face and eyes that look like they've seen things. She's not smiling. Not really. Her mouth is curved, but the expression doesn't reach her eyes, and there's something about that, something about the way she holds herself apart from the others, that makes me stop.
She's pretty. Not beautiful—not in the way the women in my father's world are beautiful, polished and painted and carefully constructed. She's pretty in a way that isn't trying. Her face is open. Her shoulders are straight. She looks like someone who knows how to work, how to survive, how to keep going when everything around her is falling apart.
I stare at the photo for longer than I mean to.
Then I walk out of the diner, and the door chimes behind me, and I light another cigarette and stand on the sidewalk and think.
I come back that night.
It's not a decision I make consciously. I tell myself I'm in the neighborhood. I tell myself I want to see what my father sees. I tell myself a dozen lies, all of them plausible, none of them true.
The truth is simpler. The truth is that I saw her face in that photo, and something about it has been sitting in my chest all day, and I need to understand what that something is.
I sit in the back corner, where the light doesn't quite reach and the shadows are thick enough to hide in. The booth is cracked vinyl, the table is sticky, and the whole place smells like bacon grease and despair. I order coffee I don't drink and wait.
She comes in at ten-thirty, just like the woman said.
I watch her hang her coat on a hook behind the counter. I watch her tie her apron around her waist—a simple gesture, unconscious, the kind of thing she's done a thousand times. I watch her check the coffee pot, wipe down the counter, rearrange the pie case with the kind of absentminded precision that speaks of someone who needs her hands to be busy.
She's smaller than I expected. Shorter. The photo made her look taller, somehow, or maybe I just filled in the gaps with my own assumptions. She moves like someone who's used to physical work—efficient, economical, no wasted motion. The farm girl, I remember. That's what Viktor said. She grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania.
I can see it now. The way she handles things. The way she doesn't flinch when the coffee pot spits steam. The way her hands are steady, always steady, even when she's doing something as mundane as wiping down a counter.
The door chimes at 1 AM, and my father walks in.
I've known Aleksander Mire my whole life. I've watched him in boardrooms and warehouses and private meetings where the stakes were measured in bodies. I've seen him negotiate with men who wanted him dead and walk away with everything they owned. I've seen him order things that would make most people vomit, and I've seen him do it with the same expression he wears while reading the morning paper.
I have never seen him smile the way he smiles when he sees her.
It's small. Barely a movement of his lips. But I know my father, and I know that his face doesn't do things by accident. Every expression is calculated, every gesture intentional. He doesn't smile unless he means to.
He means to smile at her. He means to let her see it.
She smiles back. Not the fake smile from the photo—a real one, small and surprised, like she didn't expect to be happy to see him and doesn't quite know what to do with the feeling.
"Good evening, Monika."
"Good evening, suit."
