It’s Friday, I think. The days have started bleeding into each other, losing their edges. Time moves differently up here—we’re so far above the city that the street noise doesn’t reach us, and without the usual anchors of commutes and deadlines and school drop-offs, the week has become one long, soft continuum. I’m not sure if that’s a comfort or a warning sign.
I’m pretending to read a magazine on the living room couch. What I’m actually doing is watching Hannah and Claire at the table.
Claire has been tutoring her for a few days now, and I’ve found myself manufacturing reasons to be in the same room. There’s something about the way she is with Hannah—unhurried, steady, the kind of calm that can’t be performed. I only met my grandmother a handful of times before she died, but she had that same quality. A gentleness that didn’t require effort because it simply was. Hannah responds to it the way she responds to most things—fully, immediately, without reservation.
I envy that sometimes. The ease of being four.
I’ve been sleeping better than I have in years. Part of that is Nikolai, the knowledge that he’s running his circuits through the night so I don’t have to hold the watch alone. Part of it is something I’m less willing to examine in daylight—the fact that being close to him again has unlocked a kind of rest I’d forgotten was possible. My body has been reminding me, in no uncertainterms, that I missed him. That dormancy is not the same as healing.
I haven’t felt like this since before Hannah was born. Loose in my own skin. Present. Like someone turned a frequency back on that I’d been living without so long I’d stopped noticing the silence.
I drop the magazine onto my lap.
It won’t last. It never does—not for me, not when things arrange themselves this neatly. I’ve learned to read the quiet before things break. I felt it once before, that particular quality of stillness, right before Aslanov’s men found me. Before the shipping container. Before Nikolai disappeared.
I look at Claire helping Hannah trace a letter, Hannah’s tongue poking out in concentration.
I hope I’m wrong.
I really hope I’m wrong this time.
"Clever girl." Claire taps the page. "Ten out of ten."
Hannah looks up with that smile—the one that fills her whole face—and something in my chest pulls tight.
I think about my father sometimes when Hannah does well at something. The specific, useless grief of wishing he had been different. He’s in a cell now, where he belongs, and I have made my peace with that in the way you make peace with things that don’t actually resolve—by deciding to stop letting them take up space that belongs to someone else.
My mother’s death is the same. I spent years turning it over, searching for the answer that would make it make sense. I stopped when Hannah was born. Not because I found the answer, but because I understood, holding her, that some questions eat you alive if you let them—and I had someone who needed me present more than I needed to be right.
I became someone’s whole world the day my daughter was born. I couldn’t afford to be haunted anymore.
Nikolai appears in the doorway.
He’s in a white linen shirt, the top buttons open, sleeves pushed to his elbows. He leans against the frame and surveys the room the way he always does—threat assessment first, everything else second. Then his eyes find mine.
I look back at my magazine.
This is the problem with sleeping with him. I was naive enough to think proximity and access might take the edge off. That familiarity would dial down whatever frequency he operates on that my nervous system insists on responding to. Instead, I am sitting on this couch, holding a magazine I haven’t read a word of, acutely aware of every movement he makes on the other side of the room.
He knows exactly what he’s doing, too. Yesterday he walked through here in nothing but a towel, fresh from the shower, and had the audacity to ask me where Claire keeps the extra coffee. Like I was going to be able to answer that question coherently.
Two can play at that. The push-up bra survived the night of the attack—blush pink, lace trim, one of my better investments—and it has been working harder than I have this week.
Claire, for her part, pretends not to notice any of it. Or perhaps she genuinely doesn’t. Either way, she has been quietly engineering opportunities—steering Hannah toward an activity, suggesting Nikolai and I take our coffee on the balcony, appearing in doorways at convenient moments to announce that she has things well in hand.Anytime you need,she told me yesterday.Day or night. I don’t mind.
It’s kind. It’s more than kind.
I watch her lean over Hannah’s workbook, patient and unhurried, and tell myself that’s all it is.
I know I shouldn’t be getting too comfortable with all of this.
The external world hasn’t gone anywhere—Aslanov is still out there, and Nikolai is still determined to walk into whatever comes next in his life. I try not to think about that too directly. When I do, it hollows me out.
So instead, I watch him cross to the table where Hannah is working and look over her shoulder at the page. Hannah doesn’t register him—she’s deep in concentration, pencil moving slowly, tongue just visible at the corner of her mouth. Nikolai doesn’t interrupt. He just looks, and something in his face does what it always does now when he’s near her—softens, opens up, becomes something I never expected to see on him.
He smiles to himself.
Small, private, not for anyone.
