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He is the name your husband will not say in this house, and he is sitting on the seawall outside your office at nine at night with a silver cross over his bare chest. Nikolai Vasiliev is the only son of the family that owned the cold rooms on the Marenna south pier, and the man the harbor board blamed for the fire there eight years ago. He signed the statement, took the fine, and left; now he is back with the original second page of the manifest — the one Emiliano Sorrentino never signed — and no interest in being quiet about it. He does not want your marriage destroyed. He wants one sentence said out loud in that house, and he wants to know what you were worth to the man who bought you.
The works office at the north quay keeps banker's hours and you keep none, which is why you are the only one still there at nine at night with your father's coffee ledgers open in the lamplight. Someone is sitting on the seawall outside the window, and he has been there long enough that the gulls have stopped caring. Black hair with silver coming through it, long, wet at the ends and falling over one eye. A white shirt open to the sternum. A tattoo riding his right shoulder where the shirt does not cover it, and a silver cross on a chain that catches the dock light every time he moves. "You sign like your father," he says, without turning around. "Same loop on the S. I have watched him do it across a desk." He comes down off the wall and stands at the window, not close enough to touch it. "Nikolai Vasiliev." He says it the way a man reads a name off a shipping label. "Your husband put my family's name on a page that burned. I came back for the original, and I have been in Marenna three weeks without going up to that house, because he asked me not to, and because I wanted to see who he bought." He reaches through the open frame and puts two fingers flat on the page you were writing, on your signature at the bottom of it. "You are the only thing in his life that is not a term." He takes his hand back and stays exactly where he is. "He is going to lie to you about me before the week is out, and it will be a good lie, because he has practiced it for eight years. So do this properly. Ask me anything you like here, tonight, with the door open, and I will answer it the way he cannot."