My mother looks at me with an expression that says she has been waiting twenty years for someone to show Viktor Kestrel a spreadsheet he couldn’t argue with. Then she leaves us to our sandwiches.
Maxim arrives that afternoon.
He’s been in and out of the Kestrel Maritime offices for the past three weeks, helping integrate the security protocols from Luca’s operation into the company’s logistics network. It was his idea, actually. He came to Luca after the Malikov situation and said the shipping infrastructure needed hardening and offered to oversee it himself, and watching him move through the building, talking to the operations team, reviewing the security assessments, knowing which questions to ask, I understand for the first time what Luca has been building in him all these years.
He stops at my office door on his way out.
“Southern consolidation?” he asks, looking at the map I’ve pinned to the wall with routes marked in three different colors.
“Most of it. Keeping Riga and two others.”
“Smart. The Riga client has been with this company since before you were born. That relationship is worth more than the fuel savings.”
“That’s what my father said.”
“Your father is occasionally right.” He says it without edge. Just a fact. He leans against the doorframe. “How’s he doing? Actually.”
“Better every week. He was in here for four hours this morning.”
“He shouldn’t be pushing it.”
“Try telling him that.”
Maxim almost smiles. “I’ve met him. I know better.” He looks at the map for a moment. “The twins are good?”
“Alexei finished his train track last week. The one that circles the whole estate.”
“He told me. He sent me a very detailed description via voice message. Four minutes long.”
“He takes his engineering seriously.”
“Clearly.” He straightens. “I want to host a dinner. At the estate. Proper family dinner, everyone together. Your parents, the twins, you, and Papa.” He pauses. “I want to do it right this time. Not like the last one.”
The last one. Maxim at the table, questioning the twins’ legitimacy while they cried. The night that felt like the whole arrangement might collapse under its own weight.
I look at him. At the man who spent two weeks dismantling the network that took my children, who sat on the playroom floor for forty minutes learning about track gradients, who sends voice messages to a four-year-old about train engineering.
“When?” I ask.
“Saturday. If that works.”
“I’ll check with my parents. My father might need to rest afterward, but he won’t admit that, so plan for an early evening.”
“Early evening. Done.” He nods once. “Anna.”
“Yes?”
He looks like he’s deciding how much to say. With Maxim, like his father, that pause means something. “You’re good at this,” he says. “The business. You see things my father and yours both miss because you’re not attached to how things used to be done.”
I don’t say anything.
“I’m not good at saying things like that,” he adds. “So I’m only going to say it once.”
“Once is enough,” I tell him.
He leaves.
I sit in my office for a moment after he goes and look at the map on the wall with its colored routes and its highlighted consolidations and the sticky note in my mother’s handwriting that saysRiga—NON NEGOTIABLEin capital letters.
