Somewhere in this room, something is looking at me with my uncle’s face.
I turn the new ring on my finger, feel its weight, and make a decision that has been building since I woke up to empty sheets and cooling warmth this morning.
I will find her. Whatever it takes, however long, whatever resources I burn through doing it. The drive is the reason I tell myself. The files, the exposure risk, the vulnerability she carries in that cracked blue casing.
I turn the ring once more.
It’s the drive,I tell myself.
I almost believe it.
9
LENA
I should have killed him when I had the chance.
I really should have.
That’s all my head can think every morning when I wake up, it’s almost like a routine now.
And I know it’s toxic and crazy as hell but that’s what keeps me going.
Five years of mornings and it hasn’t changed, hasn’t softened, hasn’t become any less sharp around the edges. If anything it’s gotten sharper.
I…I had a knife.
I had it in my hand. I stood over him in the dark while he slept, I had every reason in the world to drive it home but no…no, I put it down like a fool and ran, like a pathetic fool.
And somewhere out there Razvan Volkov is alive and breathing and probably not thinking about me at all.
I think about him every day.
I hate that I think about him every day.
“You’re doing the face,” Nadia says, without looking up from the stack of returns she’s sorting.
I look up from the book I’ve been staring at without reading for the last ten minutes. “What face?”
“The one where you’re thinking about something that makes you want to stab something.” She sets a book on the cart with a decisive click. “You were fine two minutes ago. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m reading.”
“You’ve been on the same page for eleven minutes. I’ve been counting.” She finally looks at me over the top of her glasses, which she started wearing two years ago and which she chose specifically because they make her look, in her own words, like an intellectual weapon. “Was it the dream again?”
I don’t answer, I can’t. I don’t even know what to say.
Nadia makes a sound that is not quite a sigh.
She goes back to her sorting with the ease of a woman who has learned exactly how much to push and exactly when to stop, which is one of approximately forty reasons she is my best friend and the reason I am still alive and functional in Budapest instead of dissolved somewhere into nothing.
Her library is small, warm and smells like old paper and the cinnamon tea she brews every morning in the back office. She opened it three years ago with money she’d been saving since before I knew her and she runs it with the focused intensity she applies to everything, which means it is meticulously organized and aggressively cozy and the kind of place that makes peoplefeel, when they walk in, like they’ve been permitted entry to someone’s living room.
There are plants everywhere. A reading corner with armchairs that have seen better decades but are comfortable in the specific way that old things are comfortable. A children’s section in the back that Theo has personally reorganized twice.
Theo.
I feel the familiar complicated pull in my chest when I think about him. I let myself feel it for exactly two seconds the way I always do then I redirect.
