"I'll call you tomorrow," I say.
He doesn't push. "Goodnight, Rafail."
I set the phone on the desk. I don't move for a long moment. The rain has picked up outside, low against the glass. She’s not pregnant. She took that shot. I know it. Viktor knows it. The knowledge that should have made me feel reassured fills me with rage.
I tap the base of the lamp.Tap. Tap. Tap. My finger strikes it over and over when I really want to hurl it against the wall. My father never wanted his outside children. There are three of us. We were nothing but tools to keep my mother tied down.
She’s not pregnant.The thought should settle something in me. It doesn’t. It leaves a hole instead.
Through the gap in the door, she shifts. A small sound. The creak of the mattress. Then nothing.
Either keep her forever.
Or let her have a life.
I stand in the dark with Viktor's voice still in my ear.Give her a choice.
Even if I don’t get one.
Chapter eight
Jana
The notification comes at 12:01 AM.
I'm already awake when it arrives — have been for an hour, lying in the dark on my side of a bed that stopped feeling like mine somewhere around day four, listening to the silence of a house that breathes differently than any space I've ever occupied. The soft chime from my phone is almost polite about it. Almost gentle, the way a doctor is gentle before delivering something that restructures your life.
Transaction complete. Deposit received: $400,000.00.
I read it twice. Set the phone face-down. The number sits on my chest and doesn't move.
I guess that's that.
Four hundred thousand dollars, transferred at the exact stroke of midnight when the contract expired — as if he'd been watching the clock, finger hovering, ready. Efficient. Clean. The way he does everything, with a precision that leaves no room for ambiguity, no crack for interpretation, no softness that might be mistaken for what it isn't.
Transaction complete.
Well. There it is.
I don't cry. That surprises me a little, but I don't. There's just the cool of his side of the bed and the slow, quiet understanding that I had two weeks to know better, and I didn't, and now the bill has come due in a currency that has nothing to do with money. I lie there another twenty minutes — because I'm not dramatic and I'm not going to fall apart over something I walked into with my eyes open — and then I get up.
The clothes Rina laundered are folded on the chair where they've sat for three days: my original jeans, my own shirt, my own jacket, returned to me with a care that felt almost apologetic, like even the staff knew. I pull them on in front of the bathroom mirror and that's where it hits me, not grief exactly but something more physical — the denim stiff and thin and faintly wrong against my skin, like wearing a cast after the bone's already healed. My shoulders don't sit right in the jacket. Two weeks of cashmere and thread counts I never knew the names of, and my own clothes have become foreign to me, which is its own indictment of how thoroughly I let this place recalibrate me.
I take a breath. Square my shoulders. The woman in the mirror looks tired, but she looks intact.
Four hundred thousand dollars,I remind her.Grandma Dorothy is in the best facility in the state. You did what you came to do. This is not a tragedy.
She doesn't look fully convinced, but she straightens her jacket anyway.
Breakfast is already laid when I come downstairs — coffee, eggs, toast arranged on the long table with the same formal precision as every other morning. Rafail sits at the head with his laptop open, a coffee cup at his elbow, dressed like a man with places to be. He doesn't look up when I enter. His eyes stay on the screen, one hand moving through whatever correspondencedemands his attention at seven in the morning, and the absence of acknowledgment is so complete it almost reads as rehearsed.
I pour my coffee. My hands are steady. I'm proud of that.
His silences have dialects — I've learned them over two weeks. There's the one that means he's thinking, the one that means he's waiting, and the one that means he's already decided and is allowing you the courtesy of believing you haven't been outmaneuvered yet. This morning's sits in the third category, weighted and deliberate, working on me before I've said a word.
I sit down. Take a sip of coffee. Set the cup down with care.
"I received the notification last night," I say. Measured and even — I'm grateful for my own voice right now. "The deposit. I wanted to say thank you — for keeping your word, for everything with my grandmother's care, for—" I pause, and my throat tightens around how long the list could be, how inadequatethank youis for any of it. "For everything."
