“He better. It’s part of his job.”
She looks at me for a long moment across the kitchen. Then she abandons the suitcase and the tote bag, crosses the kitchen, and hugs me with the full-body commitment she brings to all physical expressions of feeling, and I receive it with the equivalent commitment, minus the full-body part, because my body currently has a great deal of it accounted for.
She pulls back to look at my face, and then looks down, and then back up at my face. “You’re so pregnant.”
“I am very pregnant, yes. Twins, remember?”
“I know, but—” She gestures at the general situation. “You’re really pregnant.”
“Carrie Ann.”
“Right, sorry, I’ve seen pregnant people before, I just—it’s you.” She steps back and looks around the kitchen, which is large and warm and equipped with the kind of appliances that make Carrie Ann, who approaches cooking with the reverence some people apply to religion, go slightly still with what I can only describe as yearning. “That’s a professional range.”
“It is.”
“Eight burners.”
“Plus a griddle.”
She looks at me with an expression that is doing several things simultaneously. “Okay. Walk me through all of it. From the beginning. The real beginning, not the wedding-day versionwhere I was in shock about the bodyguard pointing a gun at my head.”
I pour her a coffee and spill the tea.
Carrie Ann listens to every detail like it’s the most fascinating thing ever. I tell her about the affair and the proposal and the marriage and the babies. When I get to the part about the car—the gun and the wrong turn and the door and what I did about it—she puts her coffee down very carefully. “You kicked a man out of a moving car?”
“He had a gun.”
“He had a—” She stops. “You’re so calm about this.”
“I’m not calm about it. I’ve had time to process it.”
“Molly, that’s—that’s a movie thing. That doesn’t happen to real people.”
“It happened to me.” I shrug. “It’s not out of the realm of life for the wife of a pakhan.”
Carrie Ann tilts her head. “Say that word again.”
“Pakhan.”
“What is that?”
“The head of a bratva. A Russian organized crime?—”
“I know what the bratva is,” she says, with mild offense. “I watched a documentary.”
“Then you have more context than I had when I started. The documentary didn’t cover pakhans?”
“I don’t think so. It was a while ago… and I didn’t have context about the cars and the guns part.” She wraps both hands around her mug and looks at me with the direct sincerity that is one of the things I love most about her. “Are you safe? Like, really? I’m not going to get a call one day?—”
“I don’t know. I’m safer than I was before the security situation got resolved. I’m safer than a woman married to a pakhan probably should be, because Pavel treats my safety as a personal project of significant ongoing importance.” I look at her steadily. “But I live in a world where things happen. Real things, not movie things. And I won’t let the fear of losing something stop me from trying to have it. I’ve spent enough of my life not having things because I was afraid of what losing them would feel like.”
Carrie Ann is quiet for a moment, absorbing this. “That’s the most Molly thing you’ve ever said.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s very good.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “I’m cautiously happy for you. With emphasis on the cautiously.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
