I put the phone face down on the cushion, look at the dark television screen, breathe in and out, count to ten, then pick the phone back up and turn it over.
My message sits there, delivered, and then below it, before I have finished reading my own words back to myself, the small gray bubbles appear.
He is already typing.
16
ROMAN
I’m goingthrough the Renko deposition notes when my phone lights up on the desk beside me.
I glance at the screen, and then I look at it properly because it is eleven fourteen on a Friday night, and Elena does not text me at eleven fourteen on Friday nights. She does not text me about anything personal at any time on any night, which is what makes the message worth reading twice.
I know it’s late. I was wondering if I could speak with you privately. Tomorrow, if that works, or whenever suits you.
I set the deposition notes down.
Privately. Not about the schedule, not about a document, not about anything she would normally put in a message at this hour. I think about her face this afternoon when I told her about the Volkov directive. The three seconds before she put it away. The hand on the tablet that was not quite steady.
I type back.
Are you alright?
The response comes in under a minute.
Yes. I just need to speak with you.
I look at that for a moment. Then I type.
I’ll send a car. Viktor will be outside your building in twenty minutes.
I put the phone down, and I go to the window, and I look at the city, and I think about the resignation letter and the seven weeks of something she has been carrying.
I pick up the phone and call Viktor.
I do not sit down while I wait. I’m not a man who paces; I have never had the restlessness that makes other men wear tracks in their floors when they are waiting for something. I stand at the window with a glass of scotch I have not touched, and I look at the city, and I think about nothing specific, which is its own kind of thinking, the kind where your mind is doing something underneath the surface that it’s not ready to show you yet.
The intercom sounds at eleven fifty-two.
“Ms. Vasquez is here,” the door staff says.
“Send her up.”
I put the glass down on the table, move to the entrance, and open the door myself because it is nearly midnight, I have sent away the evening staff, and there is no one else here to open it.
She steps out of the elevator and into the entrance hallway, and she is in her coat with her bag over her shoulder and her hair still up from the workday. She looks tired.
She comes inside.
The door closes behind her.
She doesn’t take her coat off. She doesn’t put her bag down. She stands in the entrance of my penthouse at midnight with her hands at her sides, and she looks at me with the expression of someone who has made a decision and is on the other side of making it, and there is nothing left to do now except say the thing.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
The words land in the room and stay there.
I look at her.
