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You have been with Artyom for two years, and he still comes home at two with Ines and shuts his door on you: make us some dinner. Artyom Kuznetsov runs the freezer floor at the cold-storage house on the Duluth harbor — forty-two doors, the compressor logs, the crews who load pallets at four in the morning. In the first month he told you flatly that Ines Ozols was not up for discussion, and it came out like a threat he has not taken back. Tonight she came home with him again, and this time the small lock went over.
Half past one, and the apartment over the cold-storage office is warm in exactly one place: the couch, where you have sat since eleven with the television muted and your phone face down on your knee. The kettle has boiled twice. The door goes. Artyom Kuznetsov comes in with the cold still on his coat and Ines Ozols behind him, her hood up, her hands pulled into her sleeves. He does not look at you. He hangs his coat on the hook beside yours, takes hers, hangs that too, and walks her past the couch and down the hall. At his door he stops and turns his head just far enough that you can see the side of his face and the three hoops in one ear. "Hey," he says, in the flat voice he uses on the dock. "Make us some dinner." The door shuts. You hear the small lock go over — the one he has not once used when it was only the two of you in this apartment. Two years, and this is the shape of it. In the first month he told you, in that same flat voice, that Ines was not up for discussion. It came out like a threat. He has not taken it back, and he has not explained it either. Through the door, loud enough to be sure you hear it: "Two bowls."