“More than okay.” He tilts his head slightly. “This man. Roman. Tell me about him.”
I think about Roman sitting on the edge of my bed four nights ago, sayingI am glad, in the quiet way he says things that cost him something to say. I think about his hand at my jaw in the dark and the city outside the window and the lamp going off.
“He keeps his word,” I say.
My father looks at me for a long moment. “That is nothing.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
Carla appears from the hallway at some point, and she looks at me with the expression she has been wearing since I hung up on her after the wedding. She opens her mouth, and my father says “Carla” in a tone that closes it again. Then she makes herself busy at the counter, and we let her.
My father asks me about the penthouse, and I tell him about the coffee machine and the ceiling, and he laughs.
I stay for two hours.
On the way out, I pass the hallway mirror, and I stop for a second, and I turn sideways, and I look.
Nothing yet. My stomach is flat under my coat, exactly as it has always been, no evidence of anything. I press my hand against it once, briefly, and then I take my hand away, and I go out to the car.
The wardrobe in the penthouse guest suite is not my wardrobe.
It’s a wardrobe that appeared three days after the wedding, built around a woman Roman’s stylist apparently spent forty-eight hours researching based on my measurements, my coloring, and some criteria I was not consulted on, and which has produced a collection of clothes that are the most beautiful things I have ever been in proximity to in my life.
I stand in front of it on Saturday evening, and I run my fingers along the hanging garments, and I feel the weight of the fabrics—silk, cashmere, and structured wool in colors that are not the colors I would have chosen for myself on a secretary’s salary. They are emerald, deep burgundy, and a cream that is not the cream of something practical.
I pull out a midnight-blue dress, long and fitted through the waist, with an elegant neckline that is not obvious. I hold it against myself in the mirror, and I look at my reflection for a moment, and I think about Roman having someone put this together without being asked, without making a production of it, just a wardrobe appearing in the guest suite the way things appear when Roman has decided they should exist.
I dressed myself for two years on what I could afford.
I put the dress on.
My stomach is flat. I check without meaning to, smoothing the fabric across it with one hand, and there is nothing to see yet, no curve, no evidence. Just me in a midnight-blue dress in apenthouse wardrobe, looking at a woman I am still getting used to being.
I pin my hair up.
I go find my husband.
The dinner is at the residence of a man named Volkonsky, whose name I recognize from two years of correspondence as someone Roman meets with quarterly, and whose wife sends a fruit basket to the Petrov Industries office every Christmas, which I have been signing for since my first month on the job.
The residence is in the West Village, a townhouse, four floors, and a man at the entrance who looks at me the way all of Roman’s men look at me, running the calculation, filing the result.
Roman puts his hand briefly at the small of my back as we go in, and I feel the message of that gesture, not possessive, just placing me, telling the room without words where I stand.
I do not need to be told twice.
The main room is full by the time we arrive. Thirty people, maybe more, and I know most of them before anyone makes an introduction. Federov, who sits on the eastern corridor oversight committee, whose correspondence always comes in on Tuesdays.
Bashir, whose wife receives flowers from Roman every year on their anniversary because I put it on the calendar two years ago and have been managing it since. Sorokin, who I know from the files Kostya shared as one of the council members Grigori has been cultivating since the session.
I know these men.
They do not know that I know them.
I move through the room the way I move through every room, not fast, not slow, stopping where it’s useful to stop and moving on when it’s not. Federov’s wife is easy, warm, and talkative, and I ask her about the renovation she mentioned in passing at a function three months ago that I read about in a briefing note, and she looks at me with delight.
Sorokin is harder.
He looks at me across the room, and when we are introduced, he shakes my hand and says congratulations. I hold his gaze for a beat longer than is comfortable, and I smile, and I say thank you, and I move on.
