I step into the room, moving closer but keeping distance between us. “I found enough to conclude that you’re guilty of what Dmitri suspects.”
“Then why are you telling me instead of Dmitri?”
“I already told him. I also told him that I think someone planted it.”
She turns now, her eyes meeting mine, and what I see there makes my heart sink. She looks like someone who stopped hoping a long time ago.
“You think someone planted it,” she repeats.
“Someone wants you to look guilty, Daria. Someone who had access to your home and knows what kind of evidence would condemn you.”
She stares at me, and I watch her working through how much to reveal and how much to keep hidden behind those walls she’s spent years building.
“Why are you telling me this?” She blinks back tears.
“Because I need to know the truth.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“Your job is to investigate me and to report your findings to Dmitri. Your job isn’t to warn me. It isn’t to give me a chance to explain myself. So, why are you doing it?”
I think about all the jobs I’ve done for Dmitri over the years. All the people I’ve investigated, interrogated, and eliminated. I never warned any of them. I never gave them chances or asked for explanations. I gathered the facts, delivered the verdict, and moved on to the next assignment without looking back.
But Daria isn’t like the others. She’s not a rival or a traitor or a threat to be neutralized. She’s a mother who teaches piano lessons to keep food on the table. She’s a woman who volunteers at a shelter every weekend because she knows what it’s like to need help and have nowhere to turn. She’s someone who flinches at calls from blocked phone numbers and plays Chopin in the dark when her mind won’t quiet.
She’s someone who asked me to take over because she needed to stop thinking for a while. Someone who trusted me enough to fall apart in my hands.
“I’m tired of following orders that destroy innocent people,” I say, “and of being the weapon everyone points without asking questions first.”
She searches my face. “And you think I’m innocent?”
“I think someone has been controlling you. Threatening you. Using you as a shield for their crimes. I suspect you’ve been carrying something alone for a very long time, and I think you’re exhausted from the weight of it.”
She doesn’t deny it, but she doesn’t confirm it, either.
“I can’t help you if I don’t know what I’m dealing with,” I continue. “Something about you makes me need the truth before I make decisions that can’t be undone.”
She turns back to the piano without a word. Her fingers find the keys again, and the first notes of something new fill the apartment. Not Chopin this time; something that sounds like a door closing.
I stand there for a moment longer, watching her back, watching her shoulders curve inward like she’s trying to disappear into the music.
Then I leave her to it.
Some conversations can’t be forced. Some truths have to be offered freely or not at all.
I just hope she offers hers before my ten days run out.
12
Daria
Kira falls asleep clutching Rex the T. Rex.
I stand in her doorway, watching the rise and fall of her small chest beneath the worn blanket.
She wanted me to check her closet twice and look under the bed three times tonight. Something inside her little brain picked up on the fear I’ve been hiding, the way children always sense the things adults don’t say out loud.
