The radiator ticks.
The lamp casts its particular amber light across the stack of case files between us.
I think about three days of not looking at each other's faces over the breakfast table. About the poured tea. Aboutstay furiousand the kiss that followed it and the specific quality of his voice when he saidgoodnight, Sofiaand walked out. About the way the kitchen smelled after, and the amber under-cabinet light, and sitting on the counter until the cold of the tiles finally made me get down.
"He's protecting himself too," I say.
"Probably more than you are," Mara says. "He's had longer to practice."
I look at the window.
The campus dark, the trees, November pressing against the glass.
"I'm not going to tell you it's simple," Mara says. "None of this is simple. But I'll tell you this: the version of you that walkedinto this cafeteria in October expecting to eat alone — she's gone. You're different. And I think you know that whatever's happening between you and Aleksei is part of why." She picks up the pen again. "Whether that's a good thing is a question only you can answer."
"Is it a good thing for you?" I ask. "Wherever you are with Dimitri."
She considers this with the seriousness it deserves.
"I don't know yet," she says. "But I'm interested in finding out. That's the closest thing to good that this place offers."
She opens the case file.
I sit with her in the library for another hour, neither of us talking, working on different things in the amber lamplight.
Mara annotates her case files with the aggressive certainty of someone who has always done things alone and made that fact into a strength. I study Russian vocabulary with the grammar workbook I've started keeping in my bag because the library acquisition system is starting to flag the regular requests. The radiator ticks. Somewhere in the stacks, a beam settles.
This is ordinary. This is two people working in a library because it's quiet and the light is good and the rest of the building has its own politics. This is what it looks like when something is just itself and not a performance of itself.
I've been performing for three months. I've been performing since before I arrived — the blood oath, the contract, the careful management of what I reveal and when, the slow construction of a version of Sofia who can move through this world without giving too much away. I've gotten good at it. I've gotten so good at it that I sometimes can't find the seam between the performance and the actual thing.
This: a lamp, a friend, November outside the window, Russian grammar in my lap.
This is actual.
"Mara," I say.
She looks up.
"Thank you." A pause. "For — just. Thank you."
She looks at me for a moment with the expression she uses when she's been understood correctly and is choosing not to make a thing of it. Then she goes back to her case files.
"Make yourself too expensive to break," she told me in October.
I'm starting to understand that the cost she was talking about wasn't theirs to pay.
It was mine. It's been mine all along — the cost of staying present, of choosing to be understood, of finding the specific kind of expensive that doesn't come from being worth something to someone else but from knowing what you're worth yourself.
The library breathes around us.
I open the grammar workbook to the next chapter.
The accusative case can wait.
Tonight I'm studying something else.
20
