Victor made his exit with the sunrise and the professionalism of a man who has smuggled himself out of hostile airspace before — folded blanket, empty water bottle carried out under his coat, a squeeze of my shoulder at the door that I did not report to any authority.
I had one day of leave left, and I spent it the correct way: the aquarium, with Charlotte strapped into her smallest jacket, losing her mind over a tank of moon jellies.
"Mommy! Look! They're floating like little LIGHTS!"
"Those are called moon jellies."
"MOON jellies?" Her head whipped around, eyes enormous. "Like the moon in the sky? Do they know my papa?"
Everything is connected to her papa these days. I bought her a stuffed jellyfish I will regret for approximately forever, and we came home at dusk with salt-water caramel popcorn and a painted seahorse on her cheek.
The elevator stopped at twenty-eight. The doors opened on two men.
One was our real-estate agent — Mr. Trask, a barrel-shaped, beaming, bearded man whom Charlotte had instantly and permanently named "Santa Uncle" the first time they met. He waved like we were family.
"Hello, Miss Winters! Back from your day out?"
"Santa Uncle!" Charlotte reported from my hip, at full volume. "Mommy took me to the AQUARIUM! I saw jellyfish and a octopus and a SHARK but it was sleeping!"
"A whole aquarium? My goodness, what a crew report, little princess." Trask laughed from his belly, entirely charmed, beard bouncing.
Beside him stood a man I didn't know. Tall, gray-suited, severe, with the posture of furniture that had learned to walk. He was looking at a clipboard.
He looked up.
And he stopped. Mid-breath, mid-clipboard-turn — stopped, the way crew stop when an engine gauge does something it has never done before.
His eyes went to my face. Held. Moved down — deliberately, helplessly — to the little girl on my hip.
I know that face. The thought arrived in my own head in his voice, I swear it, the shock was that loud. I've seen that face in the boss's study. In a photograph. In a photograph WITH the boss—
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I slid Charlotte off my hip and took her hand, watching him the way you watch a passenger who stands up too fast after drinks. The pup, meanwhile, peered up at the enormous stranger, blinking.
"Uncle," she inquired kindly, "are you scared of me?"
The man — Mike, someone said later; I learned his name against my will, along with his title, his salary band, and the fact that he would rather chew glass than discuss any of it — shook his head automatically.
"Hm. Then why are your eyes opening SO big at Charlotte?" She tugged my hand, whispering, not remotely in a whisper. "Uncle, blink twice if you need help."
The poor man swallowed like a man at his own tribunal. "I'm — fine. Quite fine." He flattened himself against the elevator wall to let us pass, moving like we were radioactive and precious simultaneously.
We got as far as our door. And then Charlotte, my daughter, my little diplomacy disaster, dug into her small backpack, extracted her emergency lollipop reserve — two, cherry — and trotted back across the hall.
She held one up to the frozen stranger. "Uncle. Have a candy. Then you won't be scared of me anymore."
Mike crouched down to her level — I watched it cost him something, the crouch, the closeness, the unbearable resemblance smiling up at him — and accepted the lollipop in his enormous careful hand like it was a state gift.
Then she spun to Trask and thrust the second one at him. "Santa Uncle, one for you too!"
"Ohhh! Thank you, my little princess!" Trask pressed it to his chest with both hands, beaming like he'd been knighted, and Charlotte sprinted back to me, and our door closed on the two of them.
Through the door, muffled: Trask's rolling chuckle. "That child. I'm telling you, Mr. Mike, she's my lucky charm. Every time I see her, something good happens that same day—"
"Mr. Trask." Mike's voice had reassembled itself into brisk furniture. "Show me the unit. Now."
I stood in my entryway with my keys in my hand and told myself it was nothing. A viewing. The unit across the hall — 2809, empty since before we moved in — had been on the market for months. Nobody bought 2809. It had bad light and a weird layout and the world's most boring balcony.
The next morning I carried the trash down at eight and the hallway smelled like fresh paint, and there was a SOLD sign leaning against 2809's door, and Trask was directing two movers as they carried a sofa in.
"Miss Winters! Morning!" He was radiant. He was practically glowing. "You'll have neighbors! Can you believe it — the unit sat for eight months, and then yesterday, ONE hour after the listing went private, cash offer. Full price. No —" he dropped to a delighted whisper, "— MORE than full. Triple, they say. Didn't even want to view it first. In this market! Twenty-eight years I've done this, and I've never—"
"Triple," I said. "Cash. No viewing."
"An hour, Miss Winters! I signed the papers before my coffee went cold."
I stood in the hallway with my trash bag, doing the math that did not need doing. There was exactly one man on this continent with the money to buy an apartment sight-unseen at triple asking price in under an hour, and the motive to want precisely this one — the one whose front door faces mine at a distance of nine feet.
My mother, when I told her, put down her tea, looked at me for a long time over her reading glasses, and said the most dangerous sentence in the English language:
"Good."
"Mom, this isn't — he can't just—"
"He can, and he did, and you knew he would the moment you took that job at Silverwing." She picked her tea back up, serene as a full moon. "You flew toward that man for three years in a plane you built yourself, sweetheart. He's just landing."
I spent the afternoon repacking Charlotte's little suitcase for tomorrow's rotation — seven days of flying, the moon route, the whole gauntlet — and I did not look at the door across the hall even once.
That night the moon came up nearly full over the rooftops — two days shy, fat and pale — and Wren turned and turned behind her door, restless as weather, and I lay in the dark listening to the apartment across the hall.
Around midnight, quiet as snowfall, I heard it: the soft click of a key in 2809's lock. The pause of a man standing in his own empty doorway. And then — barely there, warped by two doors and a hallway, but unmistakable, because there is no mistaking it, there never was —
He was humming.
The same four notes he always hummed on final approach.