I pull out of the lot and his headlights appear in my mirror, steady and close, and I drive home with Rafferty Orlov following me through the dark like a promise I'm too afraid to believe.
Rafferty
I follow her headlights through the dark for twenty-two minutes.
She drives carefully. Too carefully. The kind of precise, deliberate driving that tells me she's concentrating on the road because concentrating on anything else will break her. I stay two car lengths back and keep my hands loose on the wheel and my mind on the things I noticed at dinner.
The shaking wasn’t nerves. Nerves come and go in waves. Hers was constant, a low-grade tremor running through her hands that she couldn't stop no matter how hard she pressed them against the table. That's physiological. Exhaustion, malnutrition, sustained stress. The kind of shaking your body does when it's been running on adrenaline for so long it's forgotten how to stop.
That black dress was bought for a body she doesn't have anymore. It hung off her shoulders and gaped at the collarbone. She didn't eat. Didn't order. Said she wasn't hungry, but her hands trembled harder when the food arrived, like the smell of it was making her sick.
The flinching. Every time her phone buzzed in her purse, her whole body tightened in a full-body brace, like she was waiting to be hit.
And then the tears. That single drop on the white tablecloth. The way she said "someone worth marrying" like she'drehearsed the worst thing she could say about herself and still couldn't deliver it without her voice breaking.
Something is very wrong with Nadia Semakina. And it has nothing to do with me.
She turns through a set of iron gates and I follow her up a long driveway lined with mature trees. The house at the end is large, well kept, warm light spilling from the downstairs windows. Cars in the drive. A family home. Not modest, not extravagant. The kind of place where people gather and stay.
The Semakin estate. Her father's house. Her family roots.
She parks and I pull in beside her. She doesn't get out. I can see her through the window, hands still on the wheel, staring straight ahead. The porch light catches the side of her face and I can see the tracks where her makeup has smeared.
She can't go inside like this. I know that before she does. Whatever is waiting for her behind that front door, whoever is sitting in those lit rooms, she can't walk in shaking and crying and pretend she's fine.
I get out of my car and walk to hers. Tap on the passenger window. She startles, then reaches across and unlocks the door. I open it and lean down.
"Come sit with me for a minute."
She looks at the house. Then at me. Then back at the house. I watch her calculate. How long before someone looks out the window. How much time she has before her father comes to the door. How many lies she'll need to tell if she walks in right now versus five minutes from now.
"Okay," she says.
She gets out of her car and follows me to mine. I open the passenger door for her and she slides in. I get behind the wheel and we sit in the dark, her family's home glowing twenty yardsaway, close enough to see the shadows of people moving through the rooms.
The silence is heavy. She's gripping her own hands in her lap, fingers laced tight, knuckles pale. I can hear her breathing. Shallow, deliberate, the way someone breathes when they're trying not to fall apart.
"You said I should find someone else," I say. "Tell me why."
"I already told you. I'm not—"
"You told me what you think of yourself. That's not a reason. Give me the real reason you think I should walk away."
She closes her eyes. A tear slips out from under her lashes and tracks down her cheek. She doesn't wipe it away this time. It’s like she's too exhausted to bother.
"There's someone from my past," she says. Her voice is barely there. "He has photos of me. From when I was eighteen. And he's been using them to make me pay. For three years."
I don't move. I keep my hands on my thighs and my expression level while I let her talk.
"He was my boyfriend. The only boyfriend I’ve ever had." She's staring straight through the windshield. "I thought I was going to marry him. I was eighteen and I was so in love with him that nothing else existed. He asked me for photos and I sent them because I wanted to prove that I was serious. That I was all in. That he was the only one for me."
She swallows hard. I hear the click in her throat.
"I went to his apartment on my nineteenth birthday. I was going to sleep with him for the first time that night. My first time. I'd planned it for weeks. I had this dress and I'd bought new underwear and I felt beautiful. For the first and last time in my life, I felt beautiful." Her voice splinters like dry wood. "When I got to his, he was in bed with someone else."
My hands curl into fists on my thighs. Slowly, below her line of sight.
"He laughed at me and I left. I didn't think about the photos because I was too destroyed to think about anything. Then a month later, the first message came. A photo I'd forgotten existed and a line about how it would be a shame if it got around." She wipes her nose with the back of her wrist. "I paid. And I kept paying. Every dollar I could scrape together. My savings are gone. My college fund is gone. I work sixty-hour weeks at the restaurant to keep up with his demands, and they keep getting bigger, and I can't do it anymore."
