She’s wearing an oversized gray sweatshirt and those shorts that do nothing to cover her body. Her hair is down, the dark waves moving when she walks. She’s breaking chocolate into a pot of milk.
I should keep my distance, keep the safety of a screen between me and the thing I keep walking toward.
I go to the kitchen.
The corridor is dark. The kitchen light spills into the hallway, amber and warm, and I hear her before I see her, the clink of the spoon against the pot.
She spots me as soon as I step into the doorway. The spoon jerks. She’s gotten better at not spilling, but the startle is the same. The widened eyes, the sharp breath, the hand that moves to her chest before she catches it and forces it back to the counter.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I say.
The words come out before I’ve vetted them. The closest thing to humor I’ve produced in weeks, and it surprises me as much as it surprises her.
She stares at me, processing. I watch her cycle through the options, choosing how to react.
Then, seemingly on purpose, she exhales. A short, sharp breath that might just be the ghost of a laugh.
“You could try making noise when you walk,” she says. “Like a normal person.”
“Where would be the fun in that?”
16
ELLIE
He pours vodka into a crystal glass, drinking it in one motion — no sip, no pause, no wince. Just the tilt of the glass, the swallow, and the glass set down on the counter with a soft click. As if vodka is water.
I turn back to the stove. My hand is steady, which is a minor miracle considering that my pulse kicked up the moment he appeared in the doorway and hasn’t come down since.
He has a full bar in his office. I saw it — the glass cabinet, the bottles. He has every drink he could want, twenty steps from his desk.
But he’s here. In this kitchen. At this hour. Again.
His house. His rules. His kitchen. His vodka.
His reasons which he doesn’t owe me, and I don’t ask for.
The silence stretches. I stir and decide, consciously, that avoiding this man in a house I can’t leave is a strategy with a limited shelf life. We live here, both of us. Under the same roof, in the same corridors, breathing the same controlled, surveilled air. I can nod at him in hallways for the next however many months, or I can be a person.
“You look tired,” I say casually.
The silence changes shape. I feel him register the words, the first voluntary sentence I’ve offered him since the office, the first crack in the wall I built with nodded acknowledgments and averted eyes.
“I lost a friend today,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. And I mean it. Whether he’s Russian or something else, losing someone hurts the same in every language and culture.
I expect him to sit. To lean against the island the way he did last time, with his glass and his silence, occupying his side of the kitchen while I occupy mine. The arrangement we’ve established.
He doesn’t sit.
He moves toward me, narrowing his eyes.
My heart rate spikes. The déjà vu is physical — my body remembers the office before my brain catches up. The proximity. The dropping voice. The way the air thickens when he enters a radius I haven’t consented to.
He stops close. Too close, only inches away. Close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze, and the angle sends the same message it sent twelve days ago:I am small, and he is not, and the difference is the point.
His eyes find mine. The grief I heard in his voice is nowhere on his face. It’s sealed, locked, buried beneath the surface, the way everything about this man is buried. But his eyes are different tonight.Darker.
