I watch her process, then her face falls into lines that tear something apart inside my chest.
Why are you being kind to me?
It's written in every line of her face. In the way she held her fork like she was waiting for someone to take it away. In the way she glanced at me before eating, checking for what? Permission? Approval? The particular micro-expression on a man's face that signals the food is a test and the wrong response will be noted?
Twenty years. Twenty years of a man who turned meals into minefields and kindness into currency and every ordinary moment into an opportunity for control, and now she's standing in my home unable to move without first checking whether it's safe to.
I hold her gaze, but don't smile, because she'd read it as performance. I don't reassure, because she'd read it as strategy. I just look at her, steadily, openly, the way I've been looking at her since she stepped out of that car, and I let the silence do what words can't.
You're safe here. I don't know how to prove it yet. But you are.
Katya
It’s been seven days.
Seven days in a house where the doors don’t lock. Seven days with a husband who sleeps down the corridor and a mother-in-law who feeds me as if she is trying to fill something that has nothing to do with hunger. Seven days of questions that are actually questions, of silences that don’t feel like punishments, of mornings that begin with voices in the kitchen instead of footsteps in the hall.
I lie awake in the dark most nights, staring at the ceiling, trying to understand what is happening to me.
I make lists in my head. Not on paper. I stopped writing things down when I was fifteen and my father read my diary, then used it to dismantle every friendship I had. Since then, my thoughts have stayed where he can’t reach them, stored quietly behind my eyes. Most of my lists are practical ones. Exits in unfamiliar rooms. The order people speak in meetings. The subtle shifts in tone that signal danger or opportunity.
This list is different.
This one is about Killian.
Not the obvious things, not the fact that he married me or that he refused to touch me on our wedding night. It’s the smaller things that keep returning to my mind long after they happen. The details that settle quietly into my days and refuse to leave.
Every morning at breakfast he pulls out my chair before he sits down himself. The gesture is so natural I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it. The kitchen is always loud in the mornings, Saoirse cooking, Iris talking about three things at once, his brothers drifting in for coffee, but Killian always pauses long enough to make sure I’m seated first.
My father never did that for anyone. In my father’s house he sat first, always, and the rest of us arranged ourselves around him like satellites around something that didn’t care if we burned.
Killian does something else that unsettles me even more. In meetings, when men are discussing shipments or routes or negotiations I barely understand, he will pause in the middle of speaking and look at me. He doesn’t prompt me or explain the conversation. He simply waits, creating a space where my voice could exist if I chose to use it. The first time it happened I froze. The second time I offered a small observation about shipping routes in the Baltic, something I’d overheard days earlier. Killian listened to me as if the words mattered, then turned back to the man across the table and said, very calmly, “My wife makes an excellent point.”
My wife.
He didn’t say it with ownership. He said it like you might say my colleague or my partner, a quiet acknowledgement that I belonged in the room. The man across the table looked at me differently after that. Not with the polite dismissal I’m used to, but with attention.
I’m still not sure what to do with that.
There was another moment, on the third day, that keeps replaying in my mind. A man arrived for a meeting and looked at me with the casual disregard of someone who believeswomen are decorative objects at best. “Ah,” he said when Killian introduced us, “the Lazovski girl.”
The silence that followed was surgical.
Killian didn’t raise his voice. He never raises his voice. But something in the room changed when he spoke.
“My wife’s name,” he said quietly, “is Katya Orlova.”
He gave me his name like it was a shield and wielded it like a weapon. The man didn’t make the mistake again.
Then there is the tea.
Every night around nine there is a knock on my door. When I open it, Killian is standing in the corridor holding a mug of chamomile. No sugar. He must have worked out my preference on the second night, because it has been the same every evening since. He hands it to me, says goodnight, and walks away. He never tries to come inside. Never lingers. Just tea and the quiet sound of his footsteps disappearing down the corridor.
I drink it sitting on the edge of the bed and try not to think about his hands.
That is the part of my thoughts that refuses to stay organized.
His hands undoing the buttons of my dress that first morning, moving patiently down my spine, one after the other in careful succession, never once touching my skin. The discipline of that still unsettles me. Most men would have taken the opportunity. Killian treated it like a boundary he had no intention of crossing.
