“And now it’s real whether you admit it or not.” She draws in a shaky breath and asks, “How do you feel about him? Not the situation. Him.”
I stare at the floor as I reply, “I don’t know how to separate those two things right now.”
“That’s fair.” She tucks one leg under herself. “But I think you do know, and I think that’s the part that’s making all of this harder.”
She’s not wrong, which is why I don’t respond.
“What is he like?” she asks. “When it’s just the two of you.”
The question catches me off guard, which is probably why she asked. I look down at my hands, buying myself a second. “He listens. Not the way people listen when they’re just waiting for their turn to talk. He reminds me of you that way. Things I say in passing, he brings back weeks later without making a show of it. The night I lost that teenage patient, he showed up at my door and didn’t say a single useless thing. He just… stayed.”
Daria tips her head and watches me.
“I’m sorry, he did what?”
“He literally tracked my schedule. Hell, he came straight to my hospital after he got shotbecausehe knew I would be on shift.”
“That’s not romantic, Polina. That’s unhinged.”
“Exactly,” I throw my hands in the air.
“No, I don’t think you do, because you’re sitting here talking about him like he’s swoonworthy instead of a man who surveilled you.” She points at me. “You are allowed to be angry about that. Fully, completely, without qualification.”
“Iamangry about it. But… he did come forward. He brought me here himself and handed over everything he had on his father’s organization.”
Daria levels a look at me that could strip paint. “Donotdo that.”
“I’m just saying?—”
“You’re making excuses. Already. It’s been thirty seconds.” She holds up a finger. “Stay angry. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
I look at her, and despite everything, a short laugh escapes me.
She’s not wrong, which is the most irritating part. After everything he did, here I am arguing with my little sister about whether the man who surveilled me deserves mitigating circumstances. I’m not a psychiatrist, but if this were a patient presenting like this, I’d diagnose catastrophic failure of judgment with a secondary presentation of willful denial.
“I don’t know how to stop caring about him,” I admit. “And I hate that.”
The fierceness in Daria’s face dissolves into something more like understanding, and she lets out a long breath. “Okay. Fine.I’ll be reasonable. I think the truth is, you’re not angry because he’s a stranger who violated your privacy. You’re angry because you trusted him and then found out the foundation was already built before you got there. Those are not the same thing, and the second one is much harder to recover from.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
She chews the inside of her cheek like she’s deciding whether to tell me something. “I know you don’t know much about how things started with Pyotr, but he moved into my apartment the day we met. Dmitri sent him. He was building a case against me. I knew he was there to decide whether I was guilty. I was terrified of him for weeks. Then… I wasn’t, and that scared me more, because I had no business feeling anything for a man reporting my every movement back to our cousin. For a long time, I told myself what I felt wasn’t real. That I was vulnerable. That I was mistaking proximity for something deeper. That trusting him would be the stupidest thing I’d ever done.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Parts of it aren’t,” she agrees. “But the part where you can’t stop, even when every reasonable instinct is screaming at you to? That part felt exactly the same. I’m not going to tell you how to feel. I won’t tell you to forgive him. I’m asking you to consider that what he did came from somewhere, even if that doesn’t make it acceptable.”
There’s nothing to argue with, which is its own kind of frustrating. She’s not telling me anything I haven’t already tortured myself with. She’s just saying it out loud.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I tell her.
“I know.” She reaches over and squeezes my hand. “You don’t have to know today.”
We spend the afternoon together. She unpacks the bag she brought: a change of clothes for me, my good face wash, some makeup, and a bar of the chocolate she knows I reach for when I’m stressed.
She sits on the floor with her back against the bed while I sit behind her and braid her hair the way I used to when we were younger. For a while, we just talk about Kira, who apparently told her kindergarten teacher last week that her mother’s new husband taught her how to disassemble a pistol. The phone call that followed is still causing problems.
I laugh for the first time in days. It feels strange in my chest, like using a muscle I forgot I had.
