His knife stopped halfway through a strawberry. “She isn’t.”
The response came in four seconds.
She laughed nervously. “You want me to have night terrors?”
There was a photograph. He wasn’t a model—just a handsome, tired-looking man with kind eyes and a grey streak in his dark hair. He was holding a hand-carved wooden horse.
When she turned around, he was standing behind her, dripping wet, still fully dressed in his dark suit. The water on his clothes was cold.
He turned. His eyes were wet. “Yulia used to wake up at this hour,” he said. “Night terrors. I would hold her until dawn.”
“The website,” he said softly, “is not for finding love. It is for finding what is missing. And you, my darling, were missing a cage that looked like a home.”