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Lev’s eyes barely touch me. “Get back to work.”

The two words land like a bucket of ice water poured over my head.

“Lev, please, just tell me who she is to you.”

“It’s not your damn business,” he says, cutting me off before I can push any further. The rest of it dies in my throat.

The woman looks at me then, and there’s pity in it, soft and gutting and unbearable. “We have far more important things to attend to,” she says gently.

I picture the two of them walking into her father’s house, sitting down together, talking about a future, and I stumble a step sideways in a sick daze.

Lev walks her toward the elevator, and I watch their two silhouettes line up, matched and easy, like a set that was always meant to go together.

“Do you remember when I took the wrong bus in Prague?” she says, laughing a little. “I ended up three towns away by dinner.”

“You always got lost the second you went looking for the local color, Yelena,” he says, and he actually laughs, low and real.

“You remember that,” she says, surprised and soft, as though he has just handed her a piece of the past she thought was gone.

They step past the corner and out of earshot, and a slow ache climbs my ribs one bone at a time. There is no mistaking what runs between those two, and it is not new. There never was any mistaking it.

I make myself think it through, clean and cold. This is not even a betrayal. He never promised me a single thing. He never once said the words. I took his warmth and his hands and his cock and that soft, stolen Lena—a name I let myself imagine was some tenderness meant for me, when for all I know it was only ever short for Yelena, and I built a whole story out of them all by myself.

It’s not the first time I’ve been picked up, weighed, and quietly set back down. Maksim and Vanessa already taught me how fast a man can trade out whose face he holds between his hands, and whose body he takes to bed, overnight.

And still, somehow, this is worse than Maksim ever was. Maksim I could hate in a straight, clean line. Lev gave me just enough warmth to let myself fall like a fool, and there’s no one to blame for the fall but me. I knew what he was from the very first night. I knew the age between us, and the danger of him, and the fact that men like him don’t keep soft, broke girls like me. I let myself forget every piece of it because he learned my little brother’s name and let me kiss a scar nobody else would touch, and I mistook all of that for a promise he never made.

Be grateful, I tell myself. Be grateful you saw it now instead of a year from now. Finish the day. Go home to Milo. My life is already too full of people who actually need me to waste one more hour falling apart over a man who was always free to walk straight out the door.

My resolve holds for about ten seconds. Then my vision blurs and spills over anyway. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what she is to Lev, or what he is to her, or what her father could possibly want. I know only one thing for certain, and it sits like a stone at the bottom of my chest.

She came here to take him back, and he walked off with her without looking back at me even once.

13

DELANEY

“How come Lev doesn’t come around anymore?” Milo asks it through a mouthful of pasta I overcooked into something closer to glue, and the question lands harder than he could know.

He doesn’t understand what broke between the adults. All he remembers is the man who pulled him out of a river, the warm dinner afterward, and a boxing match Lev promised him and never once scheduled.

“He’s busy with grown-up work,” I say, and push the plate an inch closer to him.

“You are a grown-up.” He stabs a noodle with his fork. “You still come home and cook weird food every night.”

The kid finds the exact soft spot every single time.

“Eat your breakfast,” I tell him.

“Does this count as breakfast, or as a punishment?”

“Keep talking and it becomes dinner too.”

He goes quiet and wrestles a forkful of the glue into his mouth, thoroughly defeated. Then he perks back up, because he never stays down for long. “He said he would teach me how to throw a real punch,” he says around the food. “A left hook. He promised.”

I don’t have an answer for that one, so I hand him his juice and pretend the toaster needs my full attention. Milo watches me for a moment longer than a kid his age should be able to, then lets it go, and something about the mercy of that makes my throat go tight.

I wipe down the counter and catch my own reflection in the gray morning window over the sink. My face is calm enough. My eyes give me away, tired, lonely, and hollow around the edges.