"Yes."
"How many languages do you speak?"
"Four. Russian, English, some French, enough Serbian to insult someone's mother accurately." The last part slips out before I've vetted it, which is unusual for me, and the reward is immediate: her face does something unguarded and bright, a real smile, brief but full, and it changes her entirely. It makes her look like the woman she must have been before last night.
I look away.
"Your English is perfect," she says. "Were you educated in the US?"
"In part. Moscow first, then London, then here. My uncle believed in diversified assets, including the educational kind."
She nods slowly. I can see her cataloguing this, placing it alongside everything else she's learned today, building a picture with the careful attention of someone who understands that pictures are built from small things.
"What did you study?" she asks.
"Economics. And you?"
"English literature." Another almost-smile. "Which explains why I'm earning minimum wage as a receptionist and you're..." She gestures vaguely at the room, the house, the library full of books in four languages. "This."
"Literature is not a useless degree."
"My student loan would disagree."
I hold her gaze and I think: this. This is the thing Yury saw this morning when he told me not to be an idiot. This ease. This unlikely, inexplicable ease with a woman who should by all logic be afraid of me, or at least cautious around me, or at the very least unable to make jokes about student loans while curled up in my chair twenty-four hours after killing a man.
She isn't afraid. She said it herself this morning: I don't feel vulnerable when I'm with you. And I believed her when she said it, but I believe it more now, watching the way her body has softened into the chair, the way her breathing has slowed, the way the tight, watchful thing behind her eyes has quieted to something that looks, from where I'm sitting, almost like peace.
The mandate surfaces in my mind, as it has been surfacing all day. Yury's voice: the answer is right in front of you. My own voice, this morning, hard and certain: I won't do it.
I meant it then and I still mean it now.
But I sit in this library with a woman who argues about Edith Wharton and makes wry jokes about her earning potential and curls up in my chair like she was designed to fit there, I can’t stop thinking about the deadline that isn’t going away. I think about every woman I’ve met in the last six months who was presented to me or who presented herself, the daughters of allies, the women who looked at me and saw the position and the name and the power and wanted some or all of those things. Not oneof them made me want to sit in a room and read in silence. Not one of them looked at me and saw the man instead of the empire around him.
This woman looked at my situation and offered to help.
Not to benefit from it. To help. There was no calculation in her face when she said it. No angle. Just the clean, exhausted logic of a person who saw two broken things and thought they might mend each other.
I turned her down because it was the right thing to do. I will continue to maintain that it was the right thing to do. What I am less certain about, sitting here in the lamplight with my unread book, is whether the right thing and the true thing are the same.
"You've stopped reading," she says.
I look down. My book is open in my lap, pages facing the ceiling. I have no idea when I stopped holding it upright.
"I'm thinking," I say.
"About?"
I consider several answers. The honest one. The deflective one. The one that would redirect us back to safe territory where I’m the man who is handling things and she is the woman being handled.
"About whether Lily Bart's problems are self-created or systemic," I say.
She looks at me. Her eyes are very blue in the lamplight, and there is something in them that says she knows that's not what I was thinking about, but she's choosing to let me have it.
"Both," she says. "That's the tragedy. She can see the trap, and she walks into it anyway because the alternative is worse."
"The alternative being?"
"Being alone. Being outside the system entirely." She pauses. "Having no one."
