“I have a right to know what I’m being protected from,” I say. “I live here. I am carrying your child. I am your wife. Whatever is happening in your world that has made you decide overnight that I need eight men and a schedule that goes through Kostya, I deserve to know what it is.”
“You are safe,” he says. “That’s what you need to know.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Elena.”
“Do notElename.” I hear my voice go sharp, and I don’t pull it back because I mean it. “You walked in here this morning with a list of restrictions and a reason you will not actually explain, andyou expect me to accept that because you said so. I’m not going to do that. Tell me what is happening.”
He moves from behind the counter, and I think he’s going to walk past me and end the conversation the way he ends conversations, by simply leaving them, and I step into his path without thinking about it, and he stops.
We are two feet apart.
“What are you hiding from me?” I say.
“Nothing that concerns you right now.”
“It concerns me if it is the reason I need eight men and a Kostya-approved schedule. It concerns me if it is the reason you have been studying until two in the morning for the last three nights. It concerns me because I live in this house and I am having your baby, and whatever is out there that is making you look like that is already my problem, whether you tell me or not.”
“Like what?” he says.
“Like you’re scared.”
The kitchen goes quiet.
Roman looks at me, and I look at him, and I have said the word, and it is sitting between us now, and I watch his face for the denial that does not come. He doesn’t tell me he is not scared. He doesn’t tell me I am wrong. He stands two feet away from me in his kitchen in his jacket with his jaw tight, and he looks at me, and for three seconds, the control he keeps over every muscle of his face slips just enough that I see what is underneath it.
Not the cold efficiency of a man managing a security situation.
A man who found out something yesterday that he has not slept since learning, standing in front of the thing he found out about, trying to put himself between her and it without her knowing it is there.
My throat tightens.
“Roman,” I say, quieter now.
“Please,” he says.
One word. Quiet and direct and costing him something I can see the price of in his face. Roman Petrov does not say please. I stand in front of him, and I feel the argument go out of me like air.
“The schedule goes through Kostya,” he says. “The detail is eight. That is not a negotiation, and I need you to accept it.”
I look at his face.
I look at what is sitting behind his eyes and I think about what it costs a man like him to stand in his own kitchen and saypleaseto anyone for any reason, and I think about eight men and a rerouted schedule and three nights of two in the morning, and I think about the thing I saw in his expression for three seconds before he put it back.
“Alright,” I say.
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he picks up his keys from the counter, and he walks to the door, and he stops with his hand on the frame, and he doesn’t turn around.
“Thank you,” he says.
He leaves.
I stand in the kitchen and I listen to the elevator arrive and depart, and then I sit back down at the table. I put my hands flat on the surface and I look at nothing and I think about the word please in his mouth and the look on his face and Aleksei outside the clinic and the driver who promised to say nothing and all of it sitting in the same space at the same time pressing in from every direction.
I do not move for a long time.
30
