“But you’re going to anyway.”
“I know that too.”
She goes back to her nails, and I finish the pasta. Then we watch half an episode of something neither of us is really watching. By ten o’clock, I am in bed, staring at the ceiling, doing exactly what Mara said I would do.
The office the next morning runs the way it always runs. Emails, calls, the machinery of Roman Petrov’s professional life moving through my hands the way it has moved for two years. I amgood at this. I have always been good at this, and right now I am holding on to that with both hands because it is the one thing in my life that is not currently complicated.
Roman is in his office by eight. I set the folder on his desk, he looks up and says good morning, I say good morning, I turn and walk back out, and the distance between the door and my desk has never felt longer.
This is what the last two weeks have looked like.
Good morning. Here are your documents. The Harmon account called. Your two o’clock is confirmed.
Each exchange lasts exactly as long as it needs to last and not one second more, and underneath all of it, the thing does not go away, no matter how many times I tell it to.
At eleven, he calls me in to go over the afternoon schedule, and I sit across from his desk with my tablet, and he sits behind it. We go through everything item by item, and at some point, he asks me something, and I answer, and he looks at me for just a half second longer than the answer requires, and I look back at my screen and keep talking.
He still doesn’t know.
I have turned this over so many times that I have worn grooves in it. He doesn’t know. He cannot know.
He hosted a party for three hundred people, and a woman in a mask told him her name was Lena, and he had no reason to connect that woman to the person who has been sitting outside his office for two years. People do not look for what they are not looking for.
He doesn’t know, and I am safe, and I need to stop waiting for the moment he figures it out because it is making me jump at shadows.
I go back to my desk, answer three emails, and do not think about it for at least twenty minutes.
Aleksei picks a wine bar on 54th Street, which is designed to feel like a conversation rather than a meeting. Low lighting, small tables, and a wine list that takes itself very seriously.
He is standing near the bar when I arrive, and he smiles when he sees me.
He looks good. He has always looked good—dark hair, broad shoulders, the kind of man who fills a room without trying. I spent eight months with him two years ago before I understood that the things filling the room were not always things I wanted to be in a room with.
“Elena.” He kisses my cheek. “You look beautiful.”
“Aleksei.” I sit down. “I can’t stay long.”
He sits across from me and does not react to that. He orders wine without asking what I want, which I remember now is something he has always done, and leans back in his chair.
“Your mother tells me your father is not improving,” he says.
“She’s not my mother.”
“Carla. She tells me your father is not improving.”
I look at him. “What exactly did Carla tell you?”
“Enough to be concerned.” He turns his wineglass slowly. “I am not here to pressure you, Elena. I want you to know that. I am here because I care about what happens to you and to your father, and I have the means to make a very difficult situation significantly less difficult.”
“By marrying me.”
“By taking care of you. Both of you.” He says it simply, like it is the most reasonable thing in the world, and maybe to him it is. “I know things did not end well between us. I take responsibility for my part in that. But I am not the same man I was two years ago, and I think if you gave this a real conversation, you would see that.”
I look at my wineglass and I think about a list I made when I was nineteen of places I wanted to go before I turned thirty.
Spain was first. It has always been first. Somewhere on the southern coast where the light is different from any light I have seen and the water is that specific blue that does not exist in photographs the way it exists in real life. I have never been. I have never had the money or the time or anyone worth going with.
I look back at Aleksei and at my wineglass. The thing about Aleksei is that he is very good at this. He is very good at making the cage sound like a choice.
