Page 171 of Sweet Ruin

His head turns toward me. “Yes.”

“Near the waterfront?”

He takes a sip of coffee before he answers. “She grew up there.”

“What was her name?”

His gaze moves to the photograph. “Viktoriya.”

“Viktoriya. That’s pretty. What was she like?”

Kane keeps his attention on the woman in the frame. “Warm. Soft. She loved to feed her people.”

“Your father didn’t appreciate that?”

“He took it for granted.”

I think of the seat Kane reserved for me. My name written on the card. His hand stopping mine when I tried to serve a fourth platter.

“She went back to Sunset Park?”

“After the marriage ended, yes. It was the place she loved most in this world.”

“Did you go with her?”

“No,” he whispers, his voice hoarse and haunted. “I did not.”

Around us, his family keeps laughing. A little girl with white-blonde hair sleeps soundly in her father’s lap, with one sparkly ballet flat dangling from her toes.

Something occurs to me suddenly. A bunch of connections that all form at once.

I remember Kane walking through Sunset Park on Christmas Eve, calling it “his” neighborhood.

I remember Ekaterina recognizing the boy beneath the tattoos.

I remember asking why my building mattered and getting no answer.

“Does your mother have something to do with why you wanted the bakery?”

Kane’s face shutters at once. He looks toward Niko, then the old men, then all the children asleep against people who will take them home.

“Not tonight, Lilah.”

He has answered many of my questions with silence. He has dismissed others or changed the subject.

This is the first time I hear later inside his refusal.

I don’t push him in front of his family.

But I take the question home.

Stepan drops me at the Sheepshead Bay house after midnight. Anton and Yuri have packed enough leftovers into the trunk to sustain me through a moderate natural disaster.

“You know I own a bakery,” I tell Stepan as he stacks containers in my arms. “Food access is not a major concern.”

“They said you have to take it.”

“Who is they?”