The thought of the message circled in my mind. Friday.
I heard Viktor close a file in the study.
Last night, he had been different. Not different in any way I could have pointed to if challenged. He used the same words, the same measured attention, the same physical presence that I had understood over weeks to a degree that I found, at this point, faintly alarming in what it revealed about where my attention had gone. But underneath the sameness was a change I could not name. A stillness that was heavier than his usual stillness, the stillness of something below the surface rather than on it. He had looked at me twice last night with a look I had not seen before and had not been able to read.
I was good at reading Viktor. Better than most people would have been, because my survival had seemed, at various points, contingent on it.
Last night I had not been able to read him.
*****
Isla texted at ten with a string of messages in the cadence she used when she had been thinking about something since the previous night and had finally reached the point of deployment.
“Okay, so I know you said you’re fine.”
“But also, I have known you for four years.”
“And fine, coming from you has a wide range.”
“Come shopping with me. The outdoor mall on Charleston. I need your opinion on a jacket, and also I need to see your face.”
I looked at the messages for a long moment. The sense of normalcy would be a welcome feeling now.
So I typed:
“Noon. I’ll meet you there.”
I told Viktor I was going out. He was back at his desk. He looked up and looked at me with that same gaze from last night. Then he said, “Take the card on the nightstand. It’s for you, always. And take Oleg.”
“I don’t need—”
“Sofia.”
I took the card. And I took Oleg.
Oleg was one of the security detail, one of Viktor’s men that I saw more often. The young guy, who looked to be around my age, was quiet, as expected, someone who has learned that their job requires invisibility. He drove me to the mall and positioned himself at a distance that maintained the appearance of privacy while ensuring coverage, something I had learned was a skill Viktor’s people practiced well.
Isla was at the outdoor coffee stand when I arrived. She hugged me first. Then held me by the shoulders and looked at my face.
“Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“What? Joining you for shopping is now a suspicious activity?”
“You agreed too easily. Like you would have asked me to come out with you if I hadn’t.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Sofia Reyes.” She said my name the way Elena said my name. “I have been watching you hold yourself together since the wedding, and I am patient, but I am not infinite. Talk to me.”
We walked. The outdoor mall was lightly populated—weekday shoppers, the lunch hour population, mothers with strollers, a school group moving in a loose formation. Normal. Ordinary. The particular relief of ordinary that I had been feeling in sharper increments since the night of the apartment break-in, when ordinary had receded to a distance I could see but not access.
“I’m overwhelmed,” I said. It came out as the true sentence underneath all the other sentences, which surprised me slightly. “The marriage—it started as one thing, and it’s become—” I stopped. “I don’t know how to describe what it’s become.”
“Do you want to leave?” Isla asked. Direct, the way she always was. Always asking the hard questions.
“It’s not that type of problem,” I said.
Isla looked at me.
