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Then she holds out a folded stack of men’s clothes. “These should fit you. They got left behind here.”

“Left behind here by whom,” I say, though I already know, because a man’s shirt doesn’t turn up in a woman’s home by accident.

“They are Maksim’s,” she says. “Just some things he forgot. It’s nothing.”

My brother’s name kills every warm thing in my gut at once. I look at the clothes in her hands and I don’t take them.

“Why do you still have my brother’s things?” I ask, low.

“Because they are forgotten clothes in the back of a drawer, Lev. That is all it is.”

“You never got rid of them. Not even after he left you for Vanessa.”

She pushes the stack against my chest, exasperated. “Are you going to wear them or not?”

Her knuckles brush my forearm, and I have her wrist caught in my hand before I decide to.

Her breath hitches. She glances toward the bedroom door where Milo disappeared. “Lev,” she says, half a warning.

I don’t care in the least what the boy makes of this. “What else of his do you still keep?”

“There’s nothing else.”

“Look at me when you say it.”

She lifts her eyes to mine, annoyed and flushed. “It’s only the clothes. I swear to you.”

I watch her ears go hot and red, and only then do I release her wrist.

She pulls Milo into the bedroom and shuts the door fast behind them. I strip off my ruined shirt and pull on the T-shirt, which strains across my shoulders, and the shorts, which are frankly an insult to my thighs. The cotton pulls tight over every part of me.

Through the thin door I hear her voice change entirely. Soft, patient, coaxing, nothing at all like the edge she keeps sharpened for me. She is gentling the boy through his miserable afternoon.

I will still find Milo’s father and settle the account. But some of that cold turns now toward my brother instead. Maksim saw this woman holding an entire small life together with restitched armrests and folded cardboard, and the spineless prick called her frigid, fat, and then he left her for Vanessa and humiliated her in front of a crowd. I regret, keenly, that I didn’t break his fucking jaw at that bar.

The door opens and Delaney stops short when she sees me in the clothes. Milo, dry now, peers around her hip.

“Let me cook for you,” she says, already moving toward the cabinet. “It’s the least I can do for the man who fished my kid out of a river.”

Milo sidles up beside me and drops his voice to a stage whisper. “Sir, for your own safety, don’t let her cook.”

“How bad is it?” I murmur back.

“She turns pasta into paste. She once set off the smoke alarm making toast.” He nods gravely. “I recommend ordering in. Think of it as risk management.”

“And what exactly are you two conspiring about over there?” Delaney says from the counter, having heard every word of it.

“Just survival tips,” Milo says smoothly.

“You’re talking trash about my cooking.”

“I’m stating facts. There’s a difference between the two.”

She crosses the room and ruffles his hair into total chaos while he squirms and protests, and the two of them drop into an easy, well-worn bickering, and I stand in the middle of their cramped living room and feel something soft I have no recent word for. The room is small and shabby and completely alive with the pair of them in it.

I realize, distantly, that I’m smiling. It’s not an expression my face is used to making. I cannot recall the last time that happened without my deciding to do it.

“I have a better idea,” I say. “There is a restaurant of mine nearby. Let me take you both.”