Three locks. Two doors. One man behind them.

I have been counting things for ten years, and I am still counting now, in the back of a black car that smells of worn leather, sharp cologne, and the faint metallic tang of polished steel. The seat beneath me is cold, unyielding, pressing into my thighs through the thin fabric of my coat. The hum of the engine vibrates up my spine, a low thrum that matches the pulse in my wrists.

The driver hasn't spoken since the agency. He took my name, looked at his clipboard, opened the door. Anya Lebedev. That's what the form said. That's what I am, on paper. That's what I have been since the spring of 2016, when I walked out of a hospital with a small box in my arms and didn't ever go back to the woman whose name was on the bracelet they cut off my wrist.

The car turns into a private garage. Two armed men nod the driver through. The garage opens into a lobby that opens into a private elevator that opens into a hallway. Cold marble. No art. White light.

I am a maid. I have been a maid in seven cities, and you can tell a man by the rooms he chooses. This one chose silence.

A man waits for me by a steel door at the end of the corridor. Six and a half feet of him, bald, gray suit, two missing teeth I can see when he speaks.

"Lebedev."

"Yes."

"Stepan. Head of security." He doesn't offer a hand. I'm grateful. "Three rules. You sleep where I tell you. You go where I tell you. You ask no questions about the principal. Yes."

"Yes."

"Sign in the study. He is waiting."

The steel door opens onto a hallway I will be living in for I-don't-know-how-long. My duffel bag weighs nothing. I have been packing for ten years to weigh nothing.

Stepan walks me past three more doors. He stops in front of the last one. He doesn't knock. He pushes it open.

I take one step inside.

The room is dark wood. A brass desk lamp. A window that looks out at the river, three stories of city light reflecting on black water. The man behind the desk is already standing.

He stops.

I stop.

The world stops.

Matvei.

He is older than the boy I was going to marry. He is harder. Gray at his temples now. Hardness in his shoulders that wasn't there at twenty-two. The eyes are the same pale blue, but colder. Sky in winter.

I don't drop the bag. I don't make a sound. I have been the woman who survives for ten years and I do not know how to stop being her, even now, even here.

He doesn't speak. He doesn't move.

Stepan is in the doorway, watching us. He doesn't know what he is looking at. He thinks I am freezing because the principal is a Don. He thinks the principal is freezing because the new maid forgot her place.

I am freezing because the boy I buried half of myself with is standing six feet from me alive.

Matvei's mouth opens. The first word is hoarse. The second word does not come.

I find my voice somewhere I left it in 2016.

"You needed a signature."

Stepan does not breathe. Matvei does not breathe.

I cross the room.

I am wearing flats and a black dress and a coat I bought in a thrift store in Boston and I weigh nothing and my legs are not mine. I cross the room. I am not Tanya, who he loved. I am Anya, who cleans. I am.

The contract is on the desk.

Pen is on the contract.

I pick up the pen.

He puts his hand over mine.

His hand is warmer than I remember, heavier, calloused at the edges where it presses into my skin. The thumb rests on the inside of my wrist, tracing the seam I have been hiding for ten years, the faded raised line where I scraped myself open on my father's porch railing when he threw me clear of the fire. The contact burns, not with pain but with memory, a slow sear that travels up my arm and lodges in my chest. His grip tightens, just enough to feel the tremor in my fingers, just enough to anchor me to the desk, to him, to the scent of his breath close enough to taste, sharp with something bitter, coffee or grief.

He doesn't ask. He doesn't say my name. He doesn't say the wrong name either.

He says one word.

"Don't."

It is a command, and a question, and a prayer. It is the first word he has said to me in ten years. It used to be his word for don't go yet. It used to be his word for come closer. He used to whisper it to my collarbone in a dorm room in Ann Arbor with the radiator clicking under our backs, his lips dragging over my skin, wet and desperate, his hands pinning mine above my head as he breathed that word into me like it could keep us there forever.

It is now the only word in the world.

I should pull my hand away. I am Anya. I am here for a job. I am here because a stoneworker on Avenue C is making my dead son a marble headstone, and I have eight thousand dollars to pay for it, and I will get that money even if I have to walk through fire I already walked through.

My hand stays.

So does his.

Stepan, behind me, says nothing. Stepan has worked for Matvei long enough to know when to be invisible.

Matvei's thumb moves once across the scar. Slow. Like he is reading. Like he is mapping the damage with the pad of his finger, feeling the rough edge where skin healed wrong, the heat of my pulse beneath it quickening under his touch. His breath shifts, a shallow hitch I hear over the silence of the room, and I feel the weight of his gaze on my face even though I refuse to meet it. The air between us thickens, heavy with the ghost of old touches, of nights when his hands knew every scar before this one, when his mouth followed the lines of my body like a confession.

"Sign," he says.

I sign.

I write Anya Lebedev in the handwriting I have been practicing for ten years.

The pen moves the way a knife moves across a wrist when you are deciding whether to cut.

He releases my hand.

I do not look up. I cannot look up. If I look up, I will know whether the man across from me is going to say my real name or whether he is going to play the game I have been playing for ten years, the one where I am Anya and the dead are dead and the lost are lost.

He does not say my name.

He says, "Stepan."

"Boss."

"Put her in the east wing. The wing. Not the staff floor."

A pause behind me. Stepan does not question the principal. But Stepan is aware that the principal has just bypassed the staff floor, the housekeeper's quarters, three perfectly good rooms with deadbolts and television sets, and put a new hire alone in the wing two doors from the principal's own bedroom.

"Yes, boss."

"Now."

Matvei still has not moved. His hand is on the desk where mine was. The lamplight catches the pale knuckles, the faint tremor in his fingers where they press into the wood, as if the grain could hold the shape of my palm.

I turn for the door.

I take three steps.

His voice stops me at the threshold. Quieter, this time.

"Lebedev."

I do not turn. I cannot turn. I keep my face on the corridor.

"Yes."

"Welcome home."

I keep walking.

I clock the exits as we go. The elevator. A service stair. I clock the locks on my door. Three of them.

Twelve breaths between Stepan's footsteps fading and the moment I let myself sit on the floor of the wing and put my face in my hands.

I do not cry.

I press my thumbnail into the scar on my wrist where his thumb just was. I press until the pressure becomes a pulse, until the skin stings with the echo of his touch, until I can feel the heat of his hand lingering like a brand. I press until the wing is silent again, until the ache in my chest matches the one in my wrist, until I remember the weight of his body over mine, the way he used to hold me down with just a look, the way his breath felt against my throat when he said my name like a vow.

Three locks. Two doors. One man behind them.

He is alive.

He saw the scar.

He said don't.

I am not Anya tonight.

I do not know yet what I am.