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I curl my fingers towards me, and she leans closer, my cock fully seated inside her.

“You’re beautiful, pchelka. I will never stop telling you, even when we’re old and gray.”

She sucks in a sharp breath. Her pupils are blown wide, and she licks her lips, her perfect white teeth visible between them. “When we’re old and gray, huh? I’ll hold you to that.”

I fist her hair and crush her mouth against mine.

Vera kisses me back as her hips find their rhythm. I’ve waited so long for this that it might just end up being the fastest climax in history because the moment she starts rolling her hips and hitting the spot, I grip her ass and hold her steady while I explode inside her.

Afterwards, she lies along my right side with her leg over mine and her hand on my chest, careful even now to keep her weight off the scar.

For a long time neither of us speaks. A car goes by on the wet street, I listen to it all the way to the corner, and breathe when it keeps going.

“Rosa wants to sign soon,” she says into my shoulder. “I want you to be there.” She lifts her head to look at me. “You don’t have to do anything. Just sit there and look intimidating so the lawyer is fast.”

“I’ll try my best.”

She smiles, then nestles against me, and nowhere has ever felt more like home.

“Gold leaf,” she says. “On the window. Galina’s name, in gold, the old-fashioned kind of letters. I’ve already picked them out. There’s a man in Logan Square who still does it by hand.”

I lie in the dark with her hand on my chest and the stripe of light across the quilt, and I think about the photographs on Daniel Reed’s phone, my coat in her doorway, and the fat envelope going into her ex-husband’s jacket.

My phone wakes me early.

The light through the curtain is gray. Vera is asleep on her stomach with one arm flung across my chest.

The message is from a number saved in my phone as ZORIN DISPATCH. It’s the number that confirms our freight. Eleven days ago it sent me: Received 22 pallets, dock 3.

This morning it’s a photograph.

Taken yesterday. The card behind her says SUNDAY RYE, which she bakes once a week. Daylight in the window. A coffee cup and crumbs on the table in the foreground. Whoever took it was sitting inside her shop.

Underneath it, two words.

Good bread.

Someone sat in her shop yesterday morning, in daylight, drank her coffee, watched her working, took this picture unnoticed, and left.

I look at her sleeping beside me.

I touch her shoulder. “Vera,” I say, and wait for her eyes to open.

11

VERA

I open my eyes, and he’s holding his phone out to me.

I know before I look that it’s going to be bad. It’s me. Behind the counter in my green apron, handing a white box across to someone I can’t see. Underneath the image, two words. Good bread.

I sit up. The quilt slides off my shoulders and I tug it back, shivering suddenly.

“Who took this?” My voice sounds strange to my own ears, too calm and far away.

“Do you remember?”

I close my eyes. Sunday morning. The after-church rush, then the lull at ten. A man alone at the window table. Gray coat. Forties, maybe. Polite.