I’ve made my peace with dying before. Done it more than once, stood at the edge of it and looked down and decided it was an acceptable risk. It was easier then, when what I stood to lose was only myself.
I pull her closer and press my jaw against her hair.
This is what I’m fighting to keep. This specific weight. This particular warmth. Her breath evening back out into sleep while I hold the watch one more night.
I close my eyes.
Tomorrow, we begin.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lauren
Claire has the day off.
I told myself it shouldn’t matter—she’s been wonderful with Hannah, patient and warm and exactly what these strange, suspended days have needed. But I wake up and feel the difference immediately. Something in my shoulders that I didn’t know was braced lets go.
I portion out Hannah’s breakfast, start on Nikolai’s and mine, and the kitchen feels like it belongs to us again.
Nikolai is in the office most of the morning. I can hear him moving around up there—chair, footsteps, the low register of his voice when he makes calls. Working the problem, the way he always is. I make bad use of the time by sitting in front of the television with a cup of coffee that goes cold while Hannah builds something complicated and architectural out of couch cushions on the floor beside me.
By lunch, the three of us are at the dining table with ham and cheese sandwiches and the particular quiet of people who have stopped needing to fill silence.
I don’t have much appetite, but I eat anyway—Hannah is watching, the way she always watches, and I won’t let her learn to push food away from me.
“I don’t want the crusts,” Hannah announces, examining her sandwich with suspicion.
“You have to eat the crusts,” I reply.
“They make your hair go curly,” Nikolai says, perfectly straight-faced.
Hannah’s hands fly to her hair. She looks at her sandwich. Then back at her hair. Then she takes a cautious bite of the crust, chewing slowly, as though monitoring herself for symptoms.
I press my lips together and look down at my plate.
This is the thing that terrifies me the most—not the danger outside these walls, not the abstract threat of Aslanov, but this. The ordinariness of it. The way the three of us can sit around a table with sandwiches and make each other laugh without trying, and how natural it feels, and how much I have started to want it.
I didn’t know something was missing until he came back. Okay, that’s not entirely true. But that’s the part I can’t forgive him for, and can’t stop being grateful for, and can’t untangle from the rest of it.
Nikolai finishes first, excuses himself, and heads back upstairs to make his calls. The table feels different without him. Hannah keeps eating, unaware, narrating something quietly to Mr. Brummy about the structural integrity of her remaining crusts.
I watch her and feel the gap like a physical thing.
“Come on, baby,” I say, when her plate is clear. “Time for your nap.”
Hannah yawns wide enough to unhinge her jaw, then immediately squares her shoulders like she’s prepared to argue about it.
“I don’t need a nap. I’m too old.”
“You’re four, baby. Not fourteen.”
“I can’t wait until I’m fourteen.”
I take her hand and try not to think about that. “Yes,” I say. “Neither can I.”
She allows herself to be led to her room with the dignity of someone making a strategic concession. I tuck her in and she settles fast—pulling Mr. Brummy under her chin, eyes alreadygoing soft at the edges—and I almost think she’s down when she starts speaking.
“Mommy.”
