“He had his hand on my knee,” she says.
I say nothing.
“So, I left,” she says. “I didn’t report it. Partly because I had no energy left for the fight, and partly because I knew how those reports tend to go for women without resources. His word against mine, his reputation against my file full of ‘dramatic’ and ‘psychosomatic’ and ‘oversensitive’.” She picks up the tea again. “I kept a record of his name, though. I keep everything.”
I nod, once. I file the name away with the other things that need dealing with. It won’t be tonight, but Dr. Richard Hale is a problem now, and in my experience problems like that have a way of sorting themselves out once the right amount of pressure gets applied.
The same way I resolve everything.
Permanently.
Katriona
I wake at nine to the sound of nothing.
I notice this before the ceiling above me or the strange weight of the duvet or the pale grey light coming through curtains that aren’t mine. The silence. In my studio flat, morning comes with the floor above creaking and the bins being collected and the couple next door arguing in fast, affectionate Italian. Here, nothing but peace.
The second thing I notice is the pain.
Or rather, the absence of it. It’s never entirely gone, but right now pulled back to a dull, distant ache, manageable in a way it hasn’t been in days. The naproxen, taken with actual food for once. The bath. The heat pad, which I apparently fell asleep holding because it’s still tucked against my side, warm and faintly ridiculous.
I lie still for a moment and take stock of myself, which is a habit I developed years ago, the daily audit. Pain levels, nausea, fatigue. How much of the performance is going to be required today. What I can afford to feel and what needs to be managed into something more presentable.
Today’s audit is better than yesterday’s. Better than most days in recent memory.
I sit up slowly, testing the movement before committing to it. The room assembles itself around me. Dark furniture, cleanlines. On the nightstand, a fresh glass of water, a single white tablet, and a note in handwriting I don’t recognize yet, blocky and efficient:Second dose. Take with breakfast. Kasimir is downstairs.
No signature. He doesn’t need one. I already know his handwriting without ever having seen it: precise, undecorated, the penmanship of a man who considers flourishes a waste of motion.
I pick up the tablet and hold it between my fingers, and I think about the fact that he checked my prescription on the drive over. That he knew the dose. That the note is not an instruction so much as a reminder, the difference between a person who tells you what to do and a person who has done the work of understanding what you need and made it available. Those are entirely different things, and I have been receiving so much of the former for so long that the latter is almost unrecognizable.
Almost. But not quite.
I find the robe where I left it over the chair and pull it on. In the bathroom mirror, I look like someone who has slept a full eight hours for the first time in months, which is exactly what I’ve done, and the evidence of it feels uncomfortable for some reason. My color is better. The shadows under my eyes are still there, they are carved in by now, not going anywhere without sustained improvement, but they are lighter than yesterday.
I let myself think about Monday.
I haven’t let myself think about it properly yet. Last night I was too tired and too careful, keeping hope at arm’s length, because hope is the thing that hurts most when it doesn’t come through. I’ve had a lot of practice at being hurt by things I was stupid enough to want. But alone in this bathroom, with the morning light coming pale and clean through the frosted glass, I let the thought arrive.
A specialist. A consultation where no one will tell me I’m being dramatic. Where no one will suggest yoga. Where the conversation will begin from the premise that my pain is real and the only question is what to do about it.
I press my palm flat against the cold edge of the sink and breathe.
I want to run in the mornings. I used to run, before the pain made running a negotiation with my own body that I consistently lost. I want to eat a meal without doing the mental calculus of whether it will stay down. I want to sleep through the night without the 3am cramping that’s been my alarm clock for too long. I want to stand in the middle of a room and not be running pain management in the back of my head the whole time, the way a phone keeps a dozen apps going even when the screen looks dark.
I want a life that belongs to me. Not just survival wearing women’s clothing.
Monday might be the beginning of that. I allow myself, very cautiously, to want it.
Downstairs, Kasimir is exactly as Akyl described him. Compact, grey-haired, moving around the kitchen with the quiet authority of someone who has owned this space for longer than I’ve been alive. He greets me without fuss, gestures at the island stool and tells me in accented, measured English what the breakfast options are.
“Porridge, please,” I say. “Just a small amount.”
Kasimir nods as though this is entirely reasonable and says nothing about the fact that I arrived at one in the morning in a dinner dress and am now sitting at his kitchen island in a borrowed robe at nine on a Sunday morning. I appreciate this more than I can say.
Akyl isn’t here. There is evidence of him: a coffee cup in the sink, still faintly warm when I touch the ceramic. A newspaper folded to the business section, set aside with the precision of someone who reads the whole thing before they leave rather than picking through it over the course of the morning. His jacket isn’t on the hook by the door. He has been up for hours and he is somewhere else, being someone that I am only beginning to understand the dimensions of.
I wrap both hands around the mug of tea Kasimir sets before me and let myself think about him properly, because I haven’t yet. Last night was survival mode, the same mode I’ve been running on for three years: assess, manage, endure. There wasn’t space for thinking about Akyl Mostovoi as a man rather than as a solution to a problem.
