He Drives Himself

You don't go in.

That's the first smart thing you do, and you're proud of it later, because every cell in your body wants to push the door open and see. Instead you back down the hallway to the stairwell, your laptop pressed so hard to your ribs it hurts, and you listen.

Nothing. The building hums. Somewhere below, a TV laughs at itself.

You call 911 from the stairs with your voice doing something high and strange, and then you sit on the second-to-top step and wait, and count the radiator clanks, and don't cry.

Two officers come forty minutes later. They're young and tired and kind in a way that tells you nothing is going to happen. They go in first. Then they wave you in.

The living room is fine. Carys's plants are fine. The TV is still on the wall. Your bedroom is not fine. Every drawer is out. Your mattress has been lifted and dropped crooked. The box under your bed where you keep your tax returns, your birth certificate and the letters your father wrote you from prison has been dumped onto the rug, and the letters are scattered like leaves, and for a second that is the worst thing in the room.

Then you see what's missing.

Your work bag. The canvas one with the broken strap. Inside it: your paper working file for Brightwater, every printout, every note in your own handwriting, the photocopy of the water bill with your circles on it in red.

"Laptop?" says the older cop.

You hold it up. "I had it with me."

"Lucky." He writes something. "Anything else? Jewelry? Cash?"

"No. Just papers."

He looks at you the way people look at a woman who says just papers after a break-in, and you understand he thinks this is a boyfriend thing. He gives you a card with a report number on it. He suggests a locksmith. He tells you to stay with a friend tonight.

When they leave, the apartment is so quiet you can hear the fridge.

You pick up one of your father's letters off the floor. Kid, the food here is a crime, which is funny if you think about it. You put it back in the box very carefully. You put the box on the bed.

Then you take out the white card with the handwritten number on it, and you call it.

He answers on the first ring. "Yes."

"Did you do this?"

A pause. Not long. "Where are you, Ava?"

"In my apartment, which somebody broke into tonight while I was sitting in your office drinking your tea, which I'm starting to think was the point. My work file's gone. My notes. The water bill. Everything I showed you." Your voice cracks. You push through it. "So I'm asking. Did you send someone?"

"No." Flat, certain. "Are you alone?"

"Why?"

"Because if you're alone in a room someone broke into an hour ago, I'd like that to stop being true. Give me the address."

"You know the address. You checked me."

Another pause. You think, absurdly, that you've surprised him again.

"Twenty minutes," he says, and hangs up.

It's eighteen.

You watch from the fourth-floor window, the lights off, as a dark car pulls up and double-parks. Not a limo. Not a fleet of black SUVs. A gray Volvo station wagon, a few years old, the kind of car a pediatrician drives. The driver's door opens and he gets out alone, in a long dark overcoat, and looks up at your building like he's reading it.

You meet him in the lobby because you're not letting him upstairs. He doesn't ask to come up. He looks at your face, then at the laptop still clamped under your arm, then back at your face.

"You haven't let go of that since I met you," he says.

"It's the only copy of my work."

"Then hold onto it." He keeps his hands in his coat pockets. Deliberately, you think. "I didn't send anyone. If I'd wanted your file, I'd have asked you for it, and you'd have said no, and I'd have had to live with that. That's how I'd do it."

"That's what someone would say."

"Yes." He doesn't argue. "So don't believe me tonight. Believe me when I find out who. Where would you like to go?"

"What?"

"You can't sleep here with no lock. You know that. A hotel, I'll pay, you can hate me for it. A friend. Your father's." He says your father's gently. "I'll drive you, or I'll call you a car and never see where it goes. Your choice."

You think about Carys at work until two. You think about a hotel room with a stranger's money in it. You think about your father's house in Gerritsen Beach, the narrow blue one with the sagging porch and the canal behind it, where nobody has ever drilled out a lock because nobody would bother.

"My dad's," you say. "I'll text Carys."

You do. Break-in. I'm ok. Going to Dad's. She answers in eleven seconds, from the middle of a dinner rush: WHAT. Ava. I'm leaving right now. You tell her not to. She tells you she'll come to Gerritsen Beach at two-thirty with a crowbar and a quart of soup. You believe both parts.

"Then let's go."

The Volvo is clean inside and smells faintly of cedar. There's a paperback western on the passenger floor; he moves it to the back seat without comment. He drives the way he talks, unhurried, exact, both hands on the wheel. The Belt Parkway slides by, black water on your left, the lights of the Verrazzano strung out like a necklace in the distance.

You watch his hands. You can't help it. They're big, scarred across two knuckles, a plain gold band on his right ring finger instead of his left.

"You're married," you say, before you can stop yourself.

"I was." He doesn't look away from the road. "She died. Six years ago. Russians wear it on the right."

"I'm sorry."

"So am I." Then, after a long minute: "What was in the file that isn't on the laptop?"

You blink. Of course. Of course that's where his mind went. "My handwritten notes. The original water bill copy. Nothing that isn't backed up, except my handwriting."

"Then whoever took it knows what you know, and knows you know it." His jaw shifts. It's the first thing you've seen him do that looks like anger, and it isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at the windshield, at the dark, at someone you can't see. It makes the inside of the car feel smaller. "That was a mistake on their part."

"Why?"

"Because now I know there's a them." His voice is very quiet. "Somebody walked into your home to clean up after my books. I take that personally."

You don't say anything. Something cold and something warm move through you at the same time, and you don't have a column for either.

Your father's house is dark except for the porch light, which he leaves on every night like you might come home at any hour, which tonight you have. Aleksei pulls up and keeps the engine running.

"I can have a man sit outside," he says. "His name is Timur. He reads westerns and he's very polite. He'd stay in the car."

"No."

"All right."

That's it. All right. No argument, no are you sure. He just accepts it, and somehow that is the thing tonight that almost undoes you.

"You don't have to do any of this," you say, your hand on the door.

"I know." He looks at you finally, gray eyes in the dashboard light. "Get some sleep, Ava. Lock the door."

You get out. You let yourself in with the key under the ceramic frog. Your father is asleep in his recliner in front of a muted hockey game, snoring gently. You put the afghan over him. You lie down on the couch across from him, and you don't sleep, and you don't sleep, and at 1:12 a.m. your phone lights up on the coffee table with a number you've only had for three hours.