"You sound so sure."
I weighed the choice for half a breath. The owl lamp ticked once with the heat of its bulb.
"Can you keep a secret?"
"Cross my heart."
"Daniil is my boyfriend. Not officially. But same."
Her eyes went big. The kind of big a kid's eyes go when they have just been handed an adult thing to hold. She turned the thing over in her hands for one beat the size of a seven-year-old's beat, careful with it.
"Then why are you pretending? Like you don't know him?"
"Because right now is a lot for him. I don't want to add weight he can't carry. If he remembers on his own, that is good. If he doesn't, I'm not going to push."
"But what if he doesn't?"
"I don't know what I'll do then."
She was quiet. I watched the small wheels behind her face. Then she said the line that was going to stay with me for the rest of the night.
"Make him feel it, Chloe. He doesn't need the words. He needs the feel of it. That is what gets him back."
I looked at her for a long moment. The owl light caught the top of her head and lit the part in her hair. I leaned down and kissed the top of her head where the part was. Her hair smelled like the strawberry shampoo from the apartment, which someone had thought to bring.
"You are wiser than half the lawyers I've met," I said.
She grinned with the gap of her front teeth showing. Then she closed her eyes. She was gone in five minutes. I felt the moment her breath changed from awake breath to asleep breath, that small shift in the engine of her chest. I did not move for a long time after.
I must have slept some. I woke to a sound I did not place at first. A small wet sound that did not belong in this room. The lamp was still on. The trees outside the window were the same trees, black against a slightly less black sky. Rhea was asleep with one arm flung out over the blanket and Beom-Beom tucked under her chin. The clock in the hall did its quiet work somewhere.
I lifted my head off the pillow.
Daniil was on the floor at the side of the bed, sitting against the wall. His knees were drawn up. His head was dropped between them. His shoulders were doing the small quiet shake of a man crying in a way he had decided no one was going to see. He had not noticed I was awake.
I touched the pendant at my neck without thinking, the small weight of it under my fingertips. Then I let it go.
I slid out from under the throw a careful inch at a time so Rhea would not wake. My bare feet found the rug and then thecold edge of the floorboard past it. I crossed to him and lowered myself to the floor in front of him at the distance of an arm's length, slow on the way down, so he would hear me come before he saw me.
He lifted his head. His face was wet. The polite stranger's face from the dining room was gone. The face under it was rawer than I had ever seen on him in either of the lives I had with him.
"Want to share the pain?" I said.
He looked at me for a long beat. He did not put the polite mask back on. He let me have his face.
"Two people are dead because of a name," he said. His voice was quiet and the bratva strain ran under the gentleness in him like a wire under a floor. "Mine. I don't even know who that name belongs to. I have a brother who hugs me like he has been holding a fist closed for three months. I have a girl in there asleep who is mine and not mine. I am trying to find a man inside my head and I can't get past the door."
I reached up. I used the side of my thumb to wipe a tear off the side of his cheek. The thumb knew the angle of his jaw before my head caught up. I let it.
"You don't have to force any of it," I said. "You are strong. You're a Sorokin for a reason."
"I don't even know what that means."
"It means you carry this room without dropping it. You already are."
He breathed out through his nose. I moved closer on my knees. I got my arms around him on the floor in front of Rhea's bed. He resisted for half a second. Then he didn't. He broke against my shoulder the way a man breaks when he has been carrying a thing alone for a long stretch of days and finally meets something to set it down on. He did not make sound. He just shook and breathed and let the front of my shirt take the weight of his face.
I did not tell him I had been doing the same on a parallel road. I did not tell him about the kitchen floor in the apartment where I had folded down on the tile with my forehead against the cabinet at two in the morning more nights than I wanted to count. I let him take what he needed. I rested my cheek against the top of his head and breathed him in. He smelled like the soap from this house and like himself underneath. Both of those things were true. I held them both.
