“I see.”
“And I understood why, in the way that you understand things when you’re standing in the middle of them, and they have a certain logic. But I got home afterward, and I thought—I am following counter-surveillance protocols to visit my secret boyfriend, who is a crime lord, and somehow this has become a normal Thursday.” I look at her. “That’s insane, right? Tell me that’s insane.”
“It is somewhat outside the ordinary of certain circles,” Vet allows.
“And yet the insane part,” I continue, because I have apparently decided to say the whole thing, “is not the counter-surveillance.”
Vet’s expression doesn’t change. Which makes me wonder how many times in her life she has had this exact conversation.
“It’s when I was standing at his window looking at the city, I felt completely safe. Which makes no sense. I know what he is. I know what the people around him do. I know—” I gesture toward her, indicating the general category of her former professional life, which we are still not elaborating on. “And I still felt safer in that room than I feel most places. What does that say about me?”
Vet considers this seriously, which I appreciate. She doesn’t offer me easy reassurance, which I appreciate more. “It says that you trust him,” she says. “And that your instincts about him are not wrong. He is dangerous. He’s also a man who protects what is his with everything at his disposal.”
Am I his? In a real way? It’s not like we go out in public. Ever.
But maybe that’s a part of the protection aspect of things. I don’t know. How can I even bring this up to him without making it sound like I doubt him? Or that I’m suspicious of him?
I finally open the donut box, look at the maple glazed, and close it again. “My stomach still hasn’t forgiven me for the rabbit hole.”
“Stop doing research at eleven o’clock at night.”
“Incredibly useful advice, thank you.”
She almost smiles. It’s the Vet version of a smile, which is a slight softening around the eyes that lasts approximately one second. “You’re going to be alright, Molly.”
“You sound very certain about that.”
“I am,” she says simply, and stands, and takes the donut box to the kitchen, where it will be received with significantly more enthusiasm by the rest of the office.
I sit at my desk and think about what it means that a former wetwork specialist—operative—expressing certainty about my well-being is, genuinely, one of the more comforting things anyone has said to me lately.
My world makes less and less sense.
I spend the morning doing the work, because the work is something I can do without thinking too much. The Vasiliev account, the supplier contacts I flagged for Igor, a scheduling conflict I resolve by the simple method of telling two men with competing priorities that Pavel’s calendar does not negotiate, which is one of my favorite sentences.
I am good at this work. I have always been good at this work, and its goodness is one of the things I hold on to when the rest of the picture gets complicated.
Pavel passes my desk at ten thirty. He doesn’t stop, just the brief weight of his attention as he goes past toward the conference room, which I register in the way I register everything about him now, with an awareness that is neither professional nor entirely comfortable.
I look up and he’s already looking at me, the passing glance that is never quite as passing as it pretends to be, and for a moment I see both of them simultaneously—the man from last Thursday at the window, and the man my eleven o’clock research described—and I hold both of them in the same frame.
I know what you are, and I know what you are, and somehow both of those things are true at the same time.
He goes into the conference room. The door closes. I go back to the Vasiliev account.
The thing I can’t stop turning over, the thing that has been sitting in my chest since the research rabbit hole and the donut nausea and Vet’s calm recitation of her former professional life, is not the darkness itself. What I can’t stop turning over is the question of what it means that I can do that. That I can know what I know about this world and still feel what I feel standing at his window, and not be able to call that a mistake without lying.
Pavel is many things. But a mistake is not one of them.
Vet comes back from the kitchen without the donut box and sets a cup of coffee on my desk without being asked. The right order, the right temperature, the way she always does. She spent years doing things I will not let myself think about in detail, and shemakes excellent coffee, and she sat across from me this morning and said, “You’re going to be alright.”
I wrap both hands around the cup. It feels like surety.
At noon, Vet appears by my desk with her coat and her expectant expression. “Forty-Third?”
The deli.
My stomach, which has been staging a protest since this morning, renders a tentative verdict of cautious acceptance. “Yeah. But I’m getting the soup. The donuts were a war crime this morning.”
