The next afternoon I returned to the same July 8 announcement, past the count I'd kept rereading, to the terms below it. They hadn't been added overnight. I'd simply stopped reading where the words first hurt, leaving the rest waiting on the counter as if not looking at them could postpone what they meant.
Ellis called before I'd finished reading it myself, their voice careful in the particular way of someone delivering facts they know will be received as blows regardless of how gently they're phrased.
"The agreements required each defendant to disclose their true identity," Ellis said. "Your neighbor's legal name, publicly, is Anton Kerevin. Martin Vey was the identity he used here."
I sat with that for a second longer than I meant to, feeling the strangeness of a name replacing a man I thought I'd known by his real one, when it turned out I'd only ever known the alias, the garden, the tomatoes, all of it filed under a name that wasn't his to begin with.
"And the removal," I said, because I already knew that part was coming and wanted to hear it stated plainly rather than guess at its shape.
“The announcement provides for all ten to be removed from the United States,” Ellis said. “And for forfeiture of certain assets attributable to the offenses. Those are the public terms, not a statement that everything they owned was criminal property. I won't speculate past them, and I'd ask you not to either, not with Tess listening for every word you choose.”
"I'm not interested in speculating," I said, more sharply than I intended, and Ellis let the sharpness pass without comment, which I appreciated more than an apology would have covered.
I told Tess that evening, in the kitchen, because I didn't trust myself to say Anton Kerevin out loud in front of customers without my voice doing something I couldn't control.
She absorbed the name the way you absorb a diagnosis, nodding slowly, repeating it once under her breath like she was trying to see if it fit anywhere inside the father she remembered.
"I don't know that man," she said finally. "I knew Martin Vey. I don't know who Anton Kerevin is, and nobody's going to explain that to me, are they."
"Probably not," I admitted. "Not soon, and maybe not in any way that would satisfy either of us."
Nolan's letter arrived by courier the following morning, formal in a way his visits never were, offering renewal of the storefront lease contingent on, his words, the removal of any employee with a documented connection to the removed individuals.
I read it twice at the counter, Tess watching my face rather than the page, already guessing the shape of it from how long I was taking to say anything.
"He wants you to let me go," she said. Not a question.
"He wants me to let you go,"I confirmed. "In exchange for keeping the lease."
"You should take it," she said, fast, like she'd rehearsed offering it. "Leona, you built this place. I can find other work. I'm not worth losing it over."
"That's not a decision that's yours to make for me," I said, "and it's not one I'm making the way he wants it made, either."
I called Nolan that afternoon and told him no, plainly, without the heat I'd carried into our last conversation, because by then the anger had settled into something steadier and more useless for shouting.
"You're choosing her over the business you spent a decade building," he said, like he was reading me a verdict rather than asking a question.
"I'm choosing not to let a commercial lease decide who's guilty of what," I said. "If that costs me the business, it costs me the business. It won't cost me that."
He didn't argue further, just told me the lease would lapse at month's end, his voice gone flat and final, and I hung up knowing I'd lost the storefront and gained nothing certain in return except the one thing I'd actually meant to keep.
Tess found me afterward staring at the lapsed renewal where it still sat, unsigned, on the desk Martin had once helped set up, back when his name was still the only one I knew to call him by, and neither of us said anything for a while, because there wasn't yet a sentence built that could hold both losses at once.