The girls were asleep.

They had gone down like three small soldiers, lined up on the oversized velvet banquette that ran along the east wall, their matching red dresses bunched around their knees like fallen petals. Sophie had her thumb in her mouth; Lily’s small hand still clutched the pink notebook against her chest.

Adrien sat opposite Elena across the white linen cloth, which was now spotted with water rings and the crumbs of garlic bread Emma had insisted on feeding to the candle.

"They shouldn't have done that," Elena said again, her fingers tracing the rim of her wine glass. She hadn't touched the Merlot. "They have this... notion. Since my mother died, they watch the door. Every time the bell rings, they think..." She stopped, her jaw tightening.

"They think he's coming back," Adrien finished for her.

She looked up, startled. "Dante told you?"

"Dante tells me very little," Adrien said, swirling the dark red liquid in his glass. "I know the city. I know the men who leave through the back doors of tenements when the ledger doesn't balance. His name was Marcus, wasn't it? Marcus Vance."

Elena’s hand froze on the glass. The silence between them grew heavy, weighted by the low hum of the refrigerator in the back kitchen.

"He wasn't in the family," she said, her voice small, defensive. "He was a clerk down at the commission. He had nice teeth and he talked about moving to Vermont. When I told him about the babies... he bought a pack of cigarettes at the corner store on 4th and Delaware and never came back for his jacket."

"The jacket was wool?"

"Leather," she whispered. "A cheap one. He thought it made him look like he belonged on the docks."

Adrien set his glass down. The sound was too loud in the empty room. "He’s dead, Elena."

Her head jerked up. Her eyes—the same gray-green as Emma’s—flashed with a sudden, sharp terror. "What?"

"Two years ago," Adrien said simply. "A bad deal with the longshoremen’s union over a shipment of stolen copper out of Elizabeth. They found him in the trunk of a Buick behind a bowling alley in Secaucus. He didn't have much. Just the clothes he was wearing and a wallet with your high school picture in the plastic slot."

Elena didn't cry.

She didn't gasp, and she didn't put her hands over her face. She simply looked down at the table, her fingers whitening where they gripped the stem of the glass until the crystal seemed in danger of snapping.

"Did you do it?" she asked.

"No," Adrien said. "I have higher standards for my garbage."

A strange, dry sound came out of her throat—half a laugh, half a sob. She let go of the glass and leaned back against the leather of the chair, her shoulders sinking two inches.

"Dante said you were a monster," she murmured. "He said you ran the North River with a meat cleaver and a ledger."

"Dante is a romantic," Adrien replied. "He thinks everyone needs a second chance at domesticity because he bought a golden retriever last year and it changed his politics."

"Why did you stay?" she asked, her eyes searching his face with a sudden, unbearable intensity. "When they walked in—when you realized what kind of circus you’d walked into—why didn't you just leave through the kitchen?"

Adrien looked past her shoulder toward the banquette where the three small heads were pillowed together in the dim light. He thought of his own father, forty years ago, sitting in a kitchen that smelled of wet wool and cheap cigars, signing papers with a pen that leaked ink onto the oilcloth. He thought of the silence that had followed his mother’s funeral—a silence so vast and cold it had taken him ten years to realize he was even breathing.

"I have eleven rooms in that house on the hill," Adrien said quietly. "Every one of them is clean. Every one of them is quiet. For eleven years, I have not had a single thing in my house that I did not put there myself."

He leaned forward, planting his palms on the linen.

"Your girls brought a pink notebook into a room that hasn't seen a colored pencil in a decade, Elena. That isn't a date. That's an inspection."

"And did we pass?" she asked, her voice trembling just enough to show him she wasn't as hard as she wanted to be.

Before he could answer, the heavy front door of the restaurant rattled. Not a knock—a shoulder hitting the wood, hard, the way a man hits a door when he’s looking for someone who doesn't want to be found.