Roman has been gonefor eighteen days.
The office runs smoothly without him. Phones, meetings, and correspondence move through my hands, but nobody on this floor would know that I am spending approximately forty percent of my mental energy on a conversation that has been sitting unfinished in my chest since that afternoon.
Kostya passes through twice a day. He doesn’t ask me anything personal, and I don’t offer anything personal. We have a perfectly functional working relationship that we have maintained for two years on the shared understanding that neither of us is interested in the other’s inner life.
He does tell me, on Thursday, that Roman will land on Monday morning.
I say thank you, write it in the calendar, and go back to my screen.
Monday. Three days.
Carla calls on Friday evening while I am still at the office finishing a filing that cannot wait until Monday. I see her name on the screen, and I let it ring twice before I answer because two rings is the amount of time it takes me to arrange my face into something that will not give her anything to work with.
“Elena.” My name on her lips sounds rehearsed. “Your father had another appointment yesterday.”
I put my pen down. “What did they say?”
“The same things they always say. That he needs rest and reduced stress, and that the bills will keep coming regardless of whether we feel like paying them.” A pause. “Aleksei called again this week.”
“Carla.”
“He is not going to wait forever, Elena. He has been more than patient, and you are not being reasonable.”
“I am being completely reasonable. What I am not being is available.”
“You are twenty-three years old, and you’re sitting in an office managing someone else’s life while your father’s situation gets worse every month, and Aleksei Morozov is offering to make all of it disappear. I don’t understand what you’re waiting for.”
I look at the window. The city outside is doing its Friday evening thing, all that light and movement, indifferent and relentless.
“I’ll call you this weekend,” I say.
“Elena—”
“I’ll call you this weekend, Carla.”
I hang up before she can say his name again.
I sit at my desk for a moment with my hand still on the phone and the filing in front of me and the city outside and the arithmetic of my life adding itself up the way it keeps adding itself up, no matter how many times I try to carry the numbers differently.
My father’s bills. My salary. The gap between the two is where Aleksei’s name keeps appearing like a solution to an equation I did not agree to solve.
I finish the filing and go home.
Mara is on the couch when I get in, knees pulled to her chest, a hot water bottle pressed against her stomach, her face doing the thing it does on the first day of her period, which is existing at a low level of sustained grievance with her own body.
“There’s wine,” she says, without moving. “I can’t have any. You can have all of it.”
“I’m fine.”
“There’s also chocolate. Same terms.”
I drop my bag, take my shoes off, sit on the other end of the couch, pull my knees up, and look at the television, which is playing something neither of us has chosen deliberately.
Mara shifts the hot water bottle. Winces slightly. “I hate this. Every single month, like clockwork, my body decides to remind me it exists.”
“Mm.”
“Do you ever get cramps like this, or are you one of those people I should not be friends with?”
