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By seven, the kitchen is clean and everybody’s gone.

I do the last walk-through myself. Ovens off. Walk-in door latched. Case lights off, front lights off, register drawer empty.

I set the alarm and let myself out the back, where a stone-faced Bratva man I’ve never been introduced to nods at me from the end of the alley.

I nod back.

I get home at twenty to eight, which gives me twenty minutes to perform miracles on my face and hair.

Twenty minutes is not enough time, but it’s what I have, so I make it work. I strip out of clothes that smell like butter and burnt sugar and get in the shower with the water cranked as hot as it goes. My shoulders have knots in them the size of walnuts. I have to wash my hair twice because the first time didn’t get the frosting out.

I don’t know where we’re going. Wear what you want, he said, which men think is easy-going and women think should be punishable by law.

I go with a dark red sweater and stockings, plus boots, because it’s February and I’m not standing on a sidewalk in heels for anybody. I dry my hair as much as I can and pin the front back.

Mascara. Lipstick. Done.

In the mirror, I look tired. But I also look like a woman who moved nine hundred cookies out that door today.

The photograph is still on my nightstand, the one from the coat closet. I look at it while I put on my earrings.

Then headlights swing across the bedroom wall, and I hear a car pull up to the curb.

I grab my coat and go down.

Holi-date #3 is about to begin.

35

DELILAH

The car at the curb isn’t the Escalade. It’s the long, black sedan from New Year’s Eve, and Stepan is already out and around the hood by the time I get down my front steps.

“Ms. Dorsey.”

“Stepan. New piercing?”

He touches his brow. “Yes, ma’am. Gift from the girlfriend.”

“It looks nice on you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

He opens the back door and I get in, and there’s Kane, in a black suit with no tie, one arm stretched along the back of the seat.

His eyes go over me once, slow, from my boots up.

“You chose that yourself,” he says.

“I did.”

“It suits you.”

“That’s it? No thoughts? No critiques? No storming out of any boutiques or berating of the saleswoman who sold it to me?”

“Well, I was thinking that I’d like to tear it off you with my teeth, but it felt a bit aggressive this early in the evening, so I was going to save it until after we’ve had appetizers.” He reaches over and adjusts my coat collar where it’s flipped under.

I blush. Starting up with that nonsense right off the bat this evening, I see. Curse these shallow capillaries of mine.