“That’s a scary thought,” I say.
“You have no idea,” he mumbles, near enough to my ear to make it tickle.
“A year ago? That’s when you found him?”
“Yeah. It was magic, how we linked right up. We were instantly stronger together. I found my brother, you know?”
A passing car strobes our cocoon of a back seat. “I can’t even imagine that,” I say.
“It blew my mind. I think I felt every emotion in the world.” He lowers his voice, speaking only to me. “Kiro has to be alive.”
“He was a sweet little baby.”
After a span of silence, he says, “Tell me what you remember.” His tone breaks my heart.
“Just snapshots. Kiro with his little lick of brown hair. Kiro waving his fists all around. Always so alert. Smiling. A big, fat, happy baby.”
“Big and fat and happy.” Aleksio’s trying not to grin, but I can tell he likes that I remember. “He was…active.”
“A crazy bundle of energy.”
Aleksio’s love for a brother he hasn’t seen for two decades is beautiful. “Yeah. Flying fists. Just like his big brother, huh?” His smile fades then, and he stares darkly into the distance. “I promised my mother I’d protect him. I’ll give anything to see him safe.”
“Why do you have to give up anything? Maybe you’ll find him, and he’ll be thrilled to meet you and you guys…I don’t know, go out for a beer or something.”
He makes a sound like that’s ridiculous.
“What? That could happen. You think everything has to be hard. You think you have to give a pound of flesh to get one good thing. What if it’s easy?”
“Nothing’s easy.”
“Maybe this is easy. Why not trust that things can be okay for once? Why can’t the universe be good to you? Why can’t people surprise you?”
“Is that the way the world looks from a penthouse apartment in Rome?”
“Aleksio.” I lift my head from his shoulder, not wanting any more secrets between us. “I don’t really have those apartments. It’s fake.”
“What?”
“I live in the Bronx. With two roommates. I’m a lawyer at an advocacy center.”
He just stares at me.
“What?” I tease. “Is there a bluebird on my shoulder?”
“What the fuck?”
“Lawyer. The Bronx. As in New York. And not the nice part.”
I catch sight of his smile in the glow of passing headlights. “The shopping…”
“Fake,” I say.
“Tell me you didn’t write that fucking blog, either.”
“Nope. And if I don’t come out of this, you need to let the world know it. Because that blog, please.”
“Don’t joke like that.” He shifts beside me, strong and solid. “A fucking lawyer?”
I breathe in his scent like I’m breathing it for the last time. Like I can store it up inside me for when I escape. “Yeah.”
“But not the kind in a tall glass building. No, that’s too much like your dad. That would be robbing people with a briefcase. You wouldn’t do that.”
“A tall glass building is not on my vision board, no.”
“Advocacy for what?”
“Families in crisis. It’s mostly just poverty. You can’t imagine the spiral people get into, just from one thing going wrong.”
He touches my collar in the dark. “I’m thinking of this one time down at the marina beach—you remember that beach?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Some kids had made a sandcastle. They were gone, and it was just us two. I went over and kicked it down.”
“I couldn’t believe you did that.”
“It was so kickable,” he says. “You remember what you did?”
I bite my lip, imagining the twinkle in his eyes. “No.”
“You spent the whole day putting it back. Rebuilding it.”
I laugh. “I did?”
“You got some other kids to help,” he says. “I even helped. That’s who you are. Rebuild, repair. You made it better. I should’ve known the shopping thing was bullshit. You’d be gunning for justice. To help people. To help kids. Right? Don’t even tell me, I know it’s right. You’re there for the kids.”
Aleksio.
People were so quick to buy shopaholic Mira. But not Aleksio. Nobody has ever focused on me so intensely.
“A lawyer for kids? Am I right?”
“Juvenile and family law. Yeah.”
“Kids in trouble,” he says.
“More like keeping kids out of the system before it’s too late. Before they end up—you know…”
In the darkness, he says, “Like me.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“God forbid,” he jokes, but it’s not really a joke.
My throat feels thick. “They lowered your little coffin into the ground in front of me, Aleksio. They put you in the ground. So yeah. Kids.”
He shifts beside me. I can feel him thinking, turning things around in his mind.
“What?” I say.
“You fight to uphold the law, and I break it.” He says it lightly, but I hear the emotion. Outlining our differences.
We’re close together in the back of a car, speeding through the night, but really, we’re so far away.
“Do you still have that photo of you three that you showed Dad?” I say. “I want to look. I want to see.”
He leans up and gets Viktor to hand it back. Aleksio lights it with his phone flashlight. I hold it by the corners. It’s one of those staged photography studio photos. Aleksio is a boy in a suit, dark eyes and dark hair, sitting on a velvety backdrop with his two tiny brothers. Viktor caught midcrawl, and baby Kiro on his back in front of them, a bouncing boy. Mr. and Mrs. Dragusha in back. Young parents.
“Look at his sweet little face. Happy.”
“I remember him happy like that,” Aleksio says. “Part of me hopes he turned out different. Viktor and I remember that day in the nursery. The violence of it. But maybe Kiro doesn’t.”
I look at the scrap of paper, a moment in time, and my heart breaks for the three of them, and for their parents. To be ripped from those little sons, not knowing what would become of them. My father did that. I look up at Aleksio, and I can see the knowledge in his eyes. “I want so fucking bad for you to find him.”
He takes the picture from me and turns off the light. We ride there in the back seat flying through the night.
It’s five in the morning, nearly dawn, when we reach Glenpines Grove. The guys pull off at a townie gas station, talking between cars about how to approach the house, studying satellite images from Google Maps.
The town is tiny, and our cars—a shiny Hummer, a slick SUV and a vintage souped-up Jaguar—are way too obvious here, not to mention how they’ll stick out in the driveway of Kiro’s adoptive family.
Aleksio decides to have the two backup vehicles orbit on the main road while he, Tito, Viktor, Yuri, and I take the Jaguar and scope out the scene at the home.
We start back up and head off the main drag onto a small road that runs alongside the river, lined with run-down homes on either side and lots of huge trees. This is an old neighborhood. River neighborhoods usually are.