“I’ve seen worse cats.”
Hannah gives me a deeply skeptical look.
I take a clean sheet from the stack on the table and one of her pencils. It sits strangely in my hand—I haven’t drawn anything since I was roughly her age, and I wasn’t skilled then either. I start with a circle. The circle becomes lopsided. I add ears. They’re more like triangles that got into an argument.
Hannah watches in silence for a moment. Then she dissolves.
“That’s not a cat!”
“It’s modern art.” I keep my expression serious. “It can be whatever you want it to be.”
“It’s not anything!” She’s laughing so hard she has to put her pencil down, her whole body shaking with it. That laugh—unguarded, helpless, filling the whole room—does something to my chest I have no defense against.
I shade in one of the lopsided ears. “I think he has character.”
“He is not a cat.” She wipes her eyes, still giggling. “You’re silly.”
Just like her mother.
I lean back and let the laughter run its course. Outside, the city moves through its evening—traffic, distant sirens, the indifferent machinery of a world that doesn’t know we’re up here. In here, there’s just a bad drawing of a cat and my daughter’s laugh and the particular quality of light that comes at the end of a day when nothing terrible happened.
This is what I’m fighting for. Not the reckoning with Aslanov—that’s just the obstacle. This is the destination.Hannah making fun of my artistic failings over dinner. Lauren’s voice from the next room. The specific peace of an ordinary evening.
I look at the drawing again.
Once this is done, I think.I’m going to be here for all of it.
Chapter Nineteen
Lauren
I hear them before I see them.
Hannah’s laugh first—that particular pitch she reaches when something has genuinely undone her—and then underneath it, Nikolai’s. Low, unhurried, entirely unguarded. I don’t think I’ve heard him laugh like that before. Not once in all the time I’ve known him.
I stop on the stairs.
They’re bent over the kitchen table, a sheet of paper between them. Hannah is pointing at something on the page, shaking her head with the authority of a critic who has seen enough. Nikolai picks up the pencil with exaggerated focus—game face, shoulders squared, like this time will be different—and begins again.
It is, somehow, worse.
“It’s a potato with legs!” Hannah shrieks.
Nikolai puts the pencil down and laughs until his shoulders shake.
I grip the banister.
Something about watching the scene unfold—the ease of it, the complete absence of performance on either side—opens up a feeling I’ve not experienced before. Not warmth, exactly. Something more complicated. The joy is real and it arrives with a shadow attached, because every moment I watch them together is also a moment I’m aware of everything Hannah doesn’t know yet. Every laugh is something she’ll one day understand differently, looking back.
And the more I let myself believe in this, the more there is to lose.
The laughter settles into breathless recovery, Hannah still shaking her head at the drawing, Nikolai still defending it with a straight face.
I stand there a moment longer, watching, not quite ready to walk into the light of it.
Then I come downstairs anyway.
“Time for bed, baby,” I say, stepping into the kitchen.
