Not better the way someone looks after a good night’s sleep, better the way someone looks after a weight they have been carrying for so long they stopped noticing it has finally been lifted. There’s color in his face that was not there a month ago, and he’s standing straight in the doorway in his cardigan.
He sees the bags, and his face does the thing it has always done when I bring things he didn’t ask for.
“Elena,” he says.
“Don’t,” I say.
He steps back and lets me in.
I unpack everything in the kitchen while he sits at the table and watches, and tells me I didn’t need to do all this. I put the rye bread on the counter, the coffee in the cupboard, and the beef in the fridge, and I say I know and keep unpacking. I put the cookie tin on the small table beside his chair in the front room, and when I come back to the kitchen, he’s looking at me with something on his mind that he doesn’t say out loud.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll make the tea.”
He stands at the stove and fills the kettle and sets it on the burner and moves around the kitchen with an ease I have not seen in months, opening the cupboard for the mugs, finding the tea without having to think about where it is, and I sit at the table and I watch him and I feel something loosen in my chest that has been tight for a very long time.
We drink our tea, he asks about the penthouse, I tell him about the coffee machine, he laughs and asks about the view, I tell himit goes all the way to the horizon, and he nods like this is what he expected.
He asks about the staff, and I tell him there are two who come in during the week and he says good, you shouldn’t have to cook on top of everything else, and I don’t tell him that I have been cooking most evenings anyway because Roman comes home late and I don’t know what else to do with myself in that kitchen.
After a while, he puts his mug down, and he looks at me across the table.
“Are you happy?” he asks.
I look at my tea.
I think about Roman turning the lamp off in the dark and his hand resting on the seat between us in the car, not touching, just there. I think about the wardrobe full of clothes the color of things I wouldn’t have let myself want before. I think about sitting in a small room at his estate on our wedding day with a plain gold ring on my finger and the city spread out behind me.
“I’m safe,” I say. “Papa, I am genuinely safe. For the first time in a long time.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he nods once and picks up his mug.
“I would like to meet him,” he says. “Your husband. It is past time.”
“I’ll arrange it,” I say. “Soon.”
He nods again, and we finish our tea, and the kitchen is warm, and the light comes through the window at the low angle itcomes through at this time of year and sits across the table between us, and I let the afternoon be what it is.
Carla is in the hallway when I stand up to leave.
She’s facing the wall, her phone pressed to her ear, her voice low, the posture of someone who has moved the conversation out of the room. I catch three words before she hears my chair scrape back and turns around. The words are enough.
She ends the call when she sees me.
“Elena,” she says. The name comes out with a brightness that doesn’t match the look in her eyes. “You’re leaving already.”
“I have to get back.”
She follows me to the hallway and hands me my coat. I say goodbye to my father in the front room and I kiss his cheek and he squeezes my hand and sayssoon, about the meeting, and I saysoon.
I walk out the front door.
His car is parked across the street.
Black, expensive, the engine running, and Aleksei behind the wheel with his arm resting on the door and his eyes on the front of my father’s house. I see him before he sees me and I have approximately four seconds to decide how I am going to cover the distance between the front steps and Viktor’s car without looking like I am doing anything other than walking normally.
I walk normally.
I’m three steps from Viktor’s car when Aleksei gets out.
