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Before that, Rosa gave the police the two camera clips from that night: the alley, and the kitchen. The detective came back twice. He asked me about Daniel, and I told him what I knew, or at least what I would’ve known if Nikolai hadn’t filled in the blanks before this all happened, while he wrote it down. After, I read through the statement before I signed it, and it felt like reading a news article about a stranger.

Daniel Reed and I were married seven years ago. It ended a year later, and I didn’t see him again until a few weeks prior to the discovery of his body. It began with text messages asking for five minutes of my time, then one night, he turned up at the bakery and asked me to lend him some money. No, he didn’t tell me why he needed the money. No, he never mentioned the name Gennady Zorin. No, he never mentioned the default notice on his bar. I refused. I thought that was the end of it until his text message telling me that he’d given the alarm code to people he owed money to. I called him, and he hung up on me. I never heard from him again.

I felt drained after the detective left. I couldn’t tell him that I knew about the photographs and the money; implicating Nikolai would’ve opened a gigantic can of worms that was best left shut. It turns out that leaving gaping holes in a story is a whole lot harder than telling it chronologically from start to finish.

Inside, I turn on the lights over the counter and leave the front ones off.

Galina’s notebook is open by the register and next to the rosemary that I brought back from Fulton, at a recipe I haven’t tried yet, in her capitals across the top of the page. POPPY SEED ROLL, MY WAY. Rosa’s been making the poppy seed roll for thirty years. Galina apparently had opinions on that.

Rosa stops outside the front window. She studies the lettering, then goes around to let herself in through the back. I gave her the key the day we signed. She looked at it in her palm, then said she’d only use it to make sure I wasn’t burning the place down.

“The G is too fancy,” she says when she comes in.

“It’s Galina’s G.”

“Then it’s perfect.” She takes off her coat. “Don’t let the window cleaner wash it with anything but water.”

“The man from Logan Square said that.”

She pours herself a coffee and smiles. “My flight is on Monday. Inés says she’s making me a cheesecake, which means she’s making me pay for one.”

Thirty minutes later, the back door bangs, and Tessa comes through the staff room in her scrubs with her hair coming down and a piece of paper held above her head in both hands, like a trophy.

“I passed,” she says. “Somebody give me something with butter in it.”

Rosa says something under her breath that makes Tessa laugh and cry at the same time. I give her a croissant, and she eats it standing at the counter in her coat while she tells us about the questions she was sure she’d gotten wrong. She’s back on the night shift. She’s already complaining about the parking.

I’m still staring at the gold letters on the glass, cheeks aching from smiling, when I see him crossing the street.

He’s been north for ten days with Anton. He warned me three weeks ago that Anton might send him north. When the decision was final, he told me again. He wrote the dates on the calendar by the register in his too-careful handwriting. North. Back the morning the letters go on. He called every night at nine, after closing. He told me that Anton will want him up there for longer stretches, perhaps, months at a time, and I’m still processing this. The night before he left, at my kitchen table, with Galina’s teapot between us, I asked him where he lived.

“Here,” he said. “I work up there. I live here. With you.”

“Then give Anton back the key to Fulton.”

He took his key off the ring and put it on the table between us.

“Promise you will always come home,” I said.

“I will.” Even though we both know it isn’t a promise he can keep.

He stops on the sidewalk and looks up at the window.

Then I unlock the front door, and he comes in, while the bell over the door rings too loud.

“You’re early,” I say, moving into his arms and placing his hands on the small of my back.

He looks at Tessa, who has her chin in her hand and isn’t even pretending not to watch, and Rosa when she appears in the kitchen doorway.

“I wanted to be first,” he says.

“You already are.”

He follows me to the counter where I pour his coffee, one sugar, stirred in, and slide it across the counter to him while it’s still hot.