Page 21 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

Man charged over park attacks.

There's a photograph of the north path under the lamps, and below it a smaller one of an apartment building I don't recognize, with a police van parked in front of the roller door and a mural of a wave painted across it.

I read it twice. Charged in connection with four assaults. Officers attended an address in the city on Thursday night following an anonymous call. Items recovered at the property have been linked to attacks going back to January. A senior officer thanks the public and says he wants to reassure women in the area. A neighbor says he kept himself to himself.

"They got him," Bill says. There's a rasp in his voice that wasn't there a second ago. "Four of them. Four." He puts the paper flat on the table and smooths it with his palm, twice, like he's settling something down. "I told you. Didn't I tell you?"

"You told me," I say.

"And you rolled your eyes at me."

"I did roll my eyes at you." My own voice sounds fine. It comes out steady and warm and completely normal, and I have no ideahow, because the floor has quietly moved about an inch to the left. "You were right, Bill. Write it down, put the date on it."

Sammie has come around to read over his shoulder with her hand pressed flat against her chest.

I look up.

Jasper is already looking at me.

He hasn't moved. He's exactly where he was, at the end of the counter with the mug in both hands and one ankle crossed over the other, and his face is doing absolutely nothing at all. He holds my eyes for a second longer than a man with no opinion would, and then he takes a drink of his coffee and glances down at Lemur, and that's it. That's all of it.

Thursday night.

Half past three on Friday morning he was standing outside my door with his knuckles going white on the frame, and he ate an entire quarter of an apple loaf standing at my kitchen table without tasting a single bite of it, and then he held me for so long that the clock got loud.

An anonymous call.

Something moves through me that I don't examine too closely, standing there in the middle of the café with somebody else's sleeping baby on my shoulder and cinnamon on my hands. There's no question I could ask him here. There's probably no question I could ask him anywhere, and I don't want to. I've known it since he stood in this room and told me a man had been following me for four months and said it in the same voice he uses to tell me my cake is burnt.

Bill folds the paper and taps it once.

"You can start running again," he announces, magnanimous.

"Can I?"

"With company," he adds, and looks pointedly, and with no subtlety whatsoever, past my shoulder at the end of the counter.

"I'll take her out," Jasper says.

"Good," Bill says with a nod. "We have to protect our girls," he adds with a nod.

"I'm right here," I say, to nobody, and go and put a fresh cinnamon bun in front of Bill that he didn’t order and doesn’t pay for.

Kimmie comes over at half twelve with a lighting invoice she wants me to look at for reasons neither of us understand. She looks disappointed when there’s no burnt cake on offer today. Frowning, she accepts the cinnamon roll instead. She pulls a face of pure satisfaction on the first bite and tells me, around a mouthful of pastry, that it’s the best she’s ever had.

"The opening is now the second Saturday in May," she tells me. "Would you consider making some of these for it?" She takes another bite. "I just want something for the guests to eat if they’re hungry and these would be perfect."

I double check with Sammie and agree. Kimmie leaves just as Natan enters, his eyes roving over her as she smiles and thanks him for opening the door for her.

I close up at six. The fog is back, softer, coming in off the water and settling around the streetlights. I walk home the long way because it's beautiful and because my head is full.

Dinner is supposed to be chicken.

I put it in the oven at seven, sit down on the rug with the laptop to price up trays for the gallery opening, and it is somewhere in the middle of comparing two identical brands of parchment paper that I realize the smoke alarm has been going for a while and that the noise at the door isn't part of it.

Jasper lets himself in as I'm standing on a kitchen chair swatting a tea towel at the ceiling.

He takes in the whole scene from the doorway. The chair, the towel, the oven door hanging open, me in leggings and an ancient sweatshirt with my hair pinned up by a pencil, and the thing on the baking tray that has stopped being chicken and become archaeology.