“Alright,” she says. Careful. Neutral.
“The council is requiring me to move forward with the Volkov marriage alliance. Formally. Within the quarter.”
Something happens to her face.
Not a flicker. Not a two-second thing I have to work to catch. Her lips part slightly, and she pulls in a breath through her nose for three full seconds. Then she closes her mouth and straightens slightly in the chair, and the expression goes somewhere I cannot follow.
“How soon?” she asks. Her voice is even. Just barely.
“The quarter ends in eleven weeks.”
She nods once. She looks down at her tablet, and I watch her thumb move across the screen, not typing anything, just moving, and I notice that her hand is not entirely steady.
“I’ll make sure nothing in the forward schedule conflicts with council obligations,” she says.
“That would be helpful.”
She nods again. She doesn’t look up. “Is there anything else?”
I watch her sit in that chair with her tablet and her carefully reconstructed composure and her hand that is not quite steady and I think about the resignation letter I tore in half and the weight she has been carrying since before I landed at JFK and the thing she is not telling me that has been in every room we have shared since then.
“No,” I say. “That’s everything.”
15
ELENA
The subway hometakes forty minutes on a good day and fifty-three on a bad one, and today it takes sixty-one because there is a delay at Queens Plaza that the driver announces over the intercom in a flat tone.
I stand in the middle of the car with my bag on my shoulder and my hand on the overhead rail. I look at nothing in particular, and I think about Roman’s face this afternoon when he told me about the Volkov directive.
Not his expression. He didn’t give me an expression. That’s the thing about Roman Petrov that has taken me two years to fully understand. He doesn’t give you his face.
He gives you words, precise and sufficient, and the face stays where he puts it, still and unreadable, and you learn over time to read the things that are not the face. The angle of his shoulders, the way a silence can mean six different things depending on what preceded it.
This afternoon’s silence meant that the conversation was over, the decision had already been made, and there was nothing left to discuss.
He is getting married.
The train moves, and the woman beside me shifts her weight. Outside the windows, the tunnel does its dark repetitive thing. I stand there and hold the rail and let that sit in me for the first time without trying to manage it into something smaller than it is.
Roman Petrov is getting married and I am seven weeks pregnant with his child and he does not know, and I have been standing outside his office every day for two years with feelings I have never said out loud to anyone except Mara. Now none of it matters because a council of men in a room somewhere has decided his future for him and his future does not have me in it.
The train pulls into my stop.
I get off.
The walk from the subway to the apartment is six blocks, and I do it the way I do everything lately, on autopilot, my body moving through the familiar route while my mind is somewhere else entirely.
The bodega on the corner is doing its usual evening business, a small cluster of people outside with coffee cups, the owner’s dog tied to the railing, the way it is every evening. The dry cleaner next door has its gate half down. A group of kids from the building two doors up are doing something loud and incomprehensible on the front steps, and they part without looking up when I pass through them.
I let myself into the building and take the stairs.
Mara is in the kitchen when I push open the apartment door, standing at the stove in an apron that says something funny on it that I can’t read from here, and the smell of the pasta hits me before I have fully closed the door behind me. Something in my chest loosens slightly, the way it always loosens when I come home, the relief of a space that is mine and familiar and requires nothing from me.
“Perfect timing,” Mara says, without turning around. “Ten minutes.”
I drop my bag by the door and take my shoes off and go to the kitchen and lean against the counter and watch her stir the sauce and I think about telling her what happened today and I think about not telling her and I decide not to, at least not yet, at least not until I have sat with it long enough to know what I am actually feeling versus what I am currently feeling which is everything at once and therefore nothing useful.
