In the service ward, I lift a staff parka from the linen cage, pin my braid under a knit cap, and clip on a catering badge from last winter's gala. The badge is a prayer in plastic. No one reads it. I take the freight elevator to the laundry level, pass through steam, and let a cart hide my outline when a houseman turns his head.
The cloister stays dark in winter. I keep to the balcony's shadow and count two cameras and the dead spot to thegarden, then cut to the coal door. The metal is cold through the glove. A delivery truck noses into the alley and coughs once. The sensor chirps into the engine and dies. I step out with my head down and the parka hood up. I don't look toward the corner where the sedan idles, the car Dmitri uses. I turn downhill, away from our frontage and the driver's sightline.
Beacon Hill lifts its chin and pretends the wind was invented elsewhere. A woman in a fur hat passes, older than the day. She nods. I nod back. For a moment, we are queens of parallel kingdoms moving in opposite directions.
City rules take over from here. I slip through the florist's back room, say hello to the owner who knows me only as a woman who buys ribbon, and out to River Street. I buy a newspaper and a pack of gum with cash so my hands look occupied. A dull, persistent ache settles under my ribs, and another answers behind my eyes as I cross the line of shadow where the chapel wing ends. My grandmother would call that a sign. I call it data. I walk to the T stop by the river, tap a stored card that is not tied to my name, ride two stops, and come up on a block my father doesn't own with glass.
The clinic is three floors above. The stairwell is the color of old pistachios. A paper star hangs from a string and insists it is festive even though the tape is losing the war. I knock twice. The woman who opens knows my other names, the ones that never make it onto party place cards. We have worked together in community centers where coffee is currency and lists are sacred texts. She is a doctor by training, a neighbor by temperament, and a friend by stubbornness.She says nothing more than hello because discretion is a better vitamin than C.
She opens the door with that particular calm a good doctor wears like a uniform. She gives me a hello that lands like a hand on a shoulder and asks nothing that would bruise.
Her office smells of lemon and printer ink, no shrine to degrees, only one crooked frame and a wall clock with a red second hand. A clean counter. She gestures to the chair, checks the clock, and sets a paper cup by the sink. "This first," she says, voice low and practical. The test is simple, a strip in a small window. The second hand that has forgotten how to hurry ticks the seconds. She draws two vials of blood because she believes in numbers that don't flinch. Needle in, needle out, cotton and tape, no fuss.
She probably knows why I'm here and not in my home, checking this myself. Her gaze touches the clipboard by the door, then the street through the narrow window, where news outruns buses. A house like mine keeps ledgers on souls. This place keeps only charts.
Through the glass panel, I watch the paper star in the stairwell sway each time the elevator opens and closes. I try to count tiles. It doesn't help. When she returns, she carries the strip in two fingers the way a midwife carries a candle in a power outage during a storm. Her mouth is kind and undecorated by sympathy. She sets the result down between us as if it were both a gift and a summons.
"Positive," she says as she would to a keeper of story and shield.
The word fills the room without raising its voice. Outside, the street keeps its errands. A bus exhales, a child calls, awoman laughs too loudly, and none of it pauses for my news. Life insists on itself with or without poetry.
Pregnant.
My friend puts a clean hand on my elbow and says congratulations as if the syllables could cushion a fall. I nod because she has given me kindness wrapped in accuracy. I say yes when she offers tea. She talks about vitamins and rest and how bodies tell truths our heads bully them out of. I hear every third word and all of the tone. She doesn't ask who. The next appointment lands too close to a gala on a calendar the estate staff will never see.
I'm not naive. I'm not ready. In one instant, I'm changed. The slow burn under my ribs settles into a pulse. On the walk back, I stop at the parish that is not ours, the one where old women hold the door against wind and strangers the same way. The icon of the Mother with three stars meets my eyes without blinking. I light a candle from the flame that refuses to die and set it down. I say what I can say without lying to any heaven that might be listening—keep the work of my hands clean. Keep my mouth worthy. Don't let fear make me cruel.
I come to you with no secrets between us. The vow moves through me like winter light, clean and unforgiving. It is a line I have been rehearsing in a book that smells like salt and beeswax. The words were supposed to be hard in theory and simple in practice. A child turns them into a labyrinth. If I tell him now, will he marry me out of duty? If I wait, will he have to forgive both the secret and the fact of me? If I say nothing and the world says everything, will that break the altar under our feet?
I leave a coin because it is practical and a piece of thread because I'm my grandmother's girl. The world outside the parish is whiter than it was when I went in. The street is muffled, soft. I walk through it as if it will hold me. I'm not hiding from Dmitri. I'm also not ready to arrange his face around this news and see the shapes it learns. He is built of vow and winter and iron. He believes what he says to God is more than sound. If I tell him today, the marriage becomes a shelter he must build around us immediately. A roof is good. I want walls with windows. I want to step into that chapel knowing there is no corner shadowed by obligation. I want our names to be said with oil, not with ink.
The estate's gate recognizes me the way dogs know the hands that feed them. Inside, the afternoon lies pale on the marble like the open palm of a statue. I pass two men who carry flowers for the front hall and a girl from the kitchen with a tray of something that smells like dill and butter and the end of any argument. I nod. I keep walking.
I go upstairs with my hand sliding along the banister worn smooth by ghosts. In my room, the green stone looks less wet than usual. I sit on the floor where the light hits and openThe Book of Vowsto the page that waits.I come to you with no secrets between us. The line used to feel like a cathedral door I could not push. Today, it is a key in my fist, heavy enough to matter, mine to decide when to use.
I imagine his face when I say the words. First, surprise. It always registers in the set of his mouth, not in his eyes. Then a quiet that is not distance. It is calculation, the kind that protects before it acts. Then anger, not at the child or me, but at the thought that I would let him speak holy things into the air that held something unsaid. He wouldn't forgivethat easily. I wouldn't ask him to. The solution is honest and terrible.Tell him now. The fear that lives in my chest is wicked and simple. He will step into vows like a soldier into formation and refuse to examine the hope that has been growing between us because duty is cleaner than tenderness. Clean is not always kind.
A knock at the far end of the hall breaks the thought. Somewhere, a door opens. Somewhere, silverware touches cloth. The house flips its hours. I stand at the window and pretend the glass is a river I'm about to enter. I whisper a line from a lullaby because the silence needs a spine.
The text lands at dusk, not from the number that carries chaos but from Reza, who never uses exclamation points.Need more mittens,he writes, and ruins the deadpan with a photo of three children in dinosaur hats. The picture steadies me the way a palm steadies a heel on ice.
Yes,I answer. Mittens, wool socks, storybooks, and a box of cocoa packets.
He sends back a mug emoji and, after a beat, a line that reads,You get quiet when storms circle. Want to tell me which cloud?
I type,Inventory,then delete it. Then I erase the word and send,Delivering tomorrow at noon.
He lets that pass.Good. I will leave the back door unlatched. If you knock, I don't need to know why.
Evening drops early in this city. It always has. The lamps along the back hall are already lit, pale circles along the runner like saints with low batteries. I step out because four walls will start to talk if I let them. The corridor that leads tothe small library and the armory office turns left and then left again. I'm thinking of a line from a fairy tale about a girl who held a skull for a lantern and learned how to look directly at the things that wanted to scare her. I'm that girl when I want to be. My body makes the turn while my mind argues its case.
A sound tears the quiet in half. A body meets marble with an ugly finality. Someone curses in Russian in the tone that puts knives back into sheaths and then takes them out again anyway. I walk faster because fear shouldn't be allowed to decide how quickly a woman arrives at her own life.
The next sound is something heavy striking hard. A frame, a chair, or a table edge loses the argument. The third is a breath pulled in and swallowed. I turn into the main corridor, marble squared by men who worshiped order even when their ghosts chose silence. Tonight, the house refuses it.
Two men knot and break apart on the floor, their shapes known to me the way a childhood name is, learned once and never lost. The scuffle is tight, leather skidding on marble. A shoulder hits stone, a short, ugly sound. The guards hold the edges like statues that know their job, faces still, hands ready, letting the correction find its shape.
Aleksandr's mouth shines red, a sharp slash that makes his face look almost honest. A narrow thread of red ties my wrist, luck by inheritance, a promise the size of a seed. The smile slips when Dmitri's weight settles a fraction deeper, a law enforced. Time slows the way it does when a room turns holy or toxic. The crucifix at my throat feels heavier.The Book of Vowsupstairs is open to a line that is not a metaphor. There is a child inside me. I don't yet know where this scenebelongs in the story we are writing. I do know a house built on vows will not stand if lies are allowed to rearrange the furniture.
