Page 7 of Married to the BRATVA Guard

Then I come around the back of the car, slowly, and I look.

He’s turned his face away. He’s pretending to read the menu taped inside a nail salon window. But I know the set of his shoulders, and I know the angry red scar through his left eyebrow.

I spent three nights in that control room going through Daniel Riddings’s installation footage, frame by frame. This man was in half of it. He ran the cable to the gatehouse. He set the cameras on the north fence.

He was also the last person logged into the system the night it went dark for eleven minutes in May.

And a week later, he disappeared from Riddings’s payroll as if he’d never existed.

GALANA

There’s a black SUV parked at the end of our road.

I notice it when I take the recycling out in my robe. It’s tucked under the Hendersons’ maple with its engine off, and there’s a man in the driver’s seat who isn’t reading his phone or eating breakfast or doing any of the things people do in parked cars on a Sunday morning. He’s just sitting there.

It wasn’t there yesterday. I know every car on this street. The Hendersons have two Subarus. Mrs. Pacholczyk has a burgundy Buick she drives once a week to church. The house on the corner has a teenage son with a Camaro that he revs at midnight to annoy his father.

All of my fathers men drive black sedans.

Nobody on this street owns a black SUV.

I go back inside and lock the door, and then I stand in the hallway for a minute with my heart thumping. I could tell Arina. She’d march down there in her slippers and knock on the window and demand to know what he wants. Or I could tell Garick’s men at the gate, who’d tell Garick, who’d tell Arina, and she’d do the same thing, only angrier.

I don’t tell anyone. I go into the kitchen and start on the eggs.

Caleb arrives at nine.

He texted at eight to ask if he could come, which nobody in this family has ever done in their lives. Theo just appears. Garick sends bribes in the form of our favorite pastries. Papa’s men used to walk in through the back door without knocking and help themselves to whatever was on the stove.

Caleb asked.

I said yes before I could think about it, and then I went upstairs and changed my sweater.

He’s in the same dark coat as yesterday, but the sweater underneath is navy this time. His hair is still damp at the temples. He wipes his feet on the mat, very carefully, exactly the way he did yesterday, and I have to bite the inside of my cheek.

“Good morning,” he says.

“Good morning.” I step back to let him in. Then, because I can’t help it, “Is the SUV at the end of the road yours?”