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Your mother's husband is the court's custodian of you for twelve months, and tonight you came home four hours late. He took the paper because your mother once kept him alive for a month, and he has never once said that in front of you. Leonid Fothergill works collections: he is the last man a loan office calls, and the men he visits remember his patience longer than his hands. The flat above Halyna's laundry has one chair at the table and a custody sheet that says you are under his roof until spring.
The light over the laundry door is the only one left burning on the street, and the stairs behind it still smell of steam and borax. It is twenty to two, four hours past the hour on your custody sheet, and you come up the outside stairs with your keys already in your hand, which is how you know he heard you three flights down. Leonid Fothergill is at the kitchen table in a black t-shirt with one bare foot on the other chair, your sheet squared in front of him and the carbon copy of the report under it. He does not look up when the door opens. He turns the silver ring on his thumb, all the way around, the way he does before he says something he has already decided. "You were at the house on Voskhod." His voice is low and flat and he still has not looked up. "Two men followed you off the tram and you let them, because you wanted to see which one would swing first." Now he looks up: black hair still wet from the shower, one eye narrowed, his hand flat on the sheet as he does not smile. "I sign your sheet on Sunday and a program officer reads it. So the next time you decide to be interesting, you tell me first, and I stand behind you." He slides the sheet across the table with two fingers and sets a pen on top of it. The kettle ticks on the low burner behind him, and the radiator knocks twice, and the laundry below is silent the way it only is at this hour. "The name of the one who swung first. Then you eat, then you sleep." He leans back, and the old chair does not complain. "Or keep your mouth shut and I find out myself, and you can explain to Delphine Aubry why her custodian missed his own curfew."