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He cups my face with one hand, looks me in the eye, and says, “Someone driving by.”

It’s the first thing he has said to me that I don’t believe.

4

NIKOLAI

The cab smells of pine air freshener and someone else’s cigarettes. I sit with my right hand on my thigh and the taste of her still in my mouth, and the city goes past the window in streaks of wet light.

My phone buzzes against my leg.

Front 22:40. Flashed you. Lights on late downstairs. All quiet.

I read it once.

She asked me a simple question. I gave her a simple lie. She didn’t argue with it. She looked at me for one second longer than the lie deserved and then put her mouth against my throat.

I type: No more signals.

The answer comes before the cab has turned onto Fulton.

Copy.

I don’t tell him to stop driving past even though I know I’ll be going back.

I arrive at the same time the next night, just before closing, and the night after that, when Rosa is buttoning her coat. She looks at me over her glasses the way a customs officer looks at a suitcase, says, “Vera,” and leaves. Vera turns the sign. I sit in the same chair. She makes the coffee strong, with one sugar.

I learn things.

She gets up at four. She proofs the morning dough in the walk-in so it rises slowly overnight, because slow dough tastes like something you want to eat and fast dough tastes like flour. She has a spiral notebook of her own, next to her grandmother’s, full of numbers in pencil: the cost of a new deck oven, the cost of a used one, the cost of fixing the one they have, which is the cheapest option and the one she trusts least.

Rosa wants to retire. Everyone on the block knows it because Rosa has said so, out loud, for the last two years.

“Have you asked her?” I say on my fourth visit.

Vera turns her cup around on its saucer. She learned that from me, or I learned it from her. I can no longer tell.

“Asked her what?” Her eyes narrow on me, but I swear there are more honey flecks in the brown than there were the first time I looked into them.

“What she would sell it for.”

“I have savings,” she says to the cup. “Enough to start. Not enough to finish. If I ask her and she says a number I can’t reach, then it stops being a someday and becomes a no.”

I could tell her that a number is only data, and data can be moved. I don’t. I drink my coffee instead and consider what her response would be if I offered to help.

After a while she looks up and smiles. “You’re not going to tell me to be brave?” she asks.

“Would that help?”

“Not even a little.”

“Then no.”

She nudges my boot with hers under the table and I leave my foot where it is.

I kiss her at the door every night when I leave, and keep my hands where Yevgeny’s list would approve of them. Some nights are harder than others. She knows it, and she deliberately leans in, her breasts pressed against my chest, and laughs against my mouth when I don’t try to touch her.

The next time I touch Vera Belova, she’ll understand how much this costs me.