“I’m staying,” I said. “In the city. In the marriage.” I held her gaze. “On my own terms.”
She looked at me for a moment. “And Viktor?”
“Is aware of what my terms are,” I said. “And has indicated he’s prepared to be in a relationship with the terms rather than despite them.”
“That’s,” she searched for the word, “more self-aware than I expected from him.”
“He surprised me,” I said.
She looked at something in my face that I wasn’t hiding. A peaceful softening.
“Good,” she said simply.
We drank our coffee and talked for two hours about ordinary things—her work, Mikhail’s ongoing campaign to convince her that caviar was a reasonable daily food group, a dress she had found and couldn’t decide about, the Golovin sisters’ various projects. I listened and talked and felt the specific, uncomplicated relief of ordinary things being ordinary.
When she left, she hugged me at the door for a long time.
“I’m glad you’re still here,” she said.
“Me too,” I said.
I meant the city. I also meant the life. I also meant standing in the door of the penthouse watching Elena walk toward the elevator with her bag on her shoulder, the specific warmth of the watching—the knowledge that this person was in my life in a way that was no longer provisional, that I had stopped building portability, that the people I had were people I was staying for.
I closed the door and stood in the entrance of the penthouse, and looked at the space that had become mine.
It still looked like Viktor. It also, I noticed, looked like me. The book on the side table was not his. The jacket on the hook near the door was mine. The specific coffee cup I had claimed by habit, turned upside down on the drying rack next to his, both of them there as a matter of daily routine.
Small. Unremarkable. I stood in the entrance and let it be what it was.
Viktor came home from the casino at 7 pm. I heard the footsteps I had learned in the hall, the door, the specific choreography of his return that I had been tracking for weeksand had stopped tracking, and had found I still knew without trying. I was at the window with a glass of wine, which I had been holding more than drinking.
“Sofia,” he breathed, kissing my lips.
Just as he released my lips, I reclaimed his lips with another kiss.
“Welcome. How was work?”
“Uneventful.”
He came to stand beside me.
We looked at the city for a few minutes without speaking. This was another thing we did now–learning to be in silence.
“I want to tell you something,” I said.
He looked at me.
“I have been thinking about whether to say it for two weeks,” I said. “And I have concluded that not saying it because it makes me feel exposed is exactly the kind of thing I am trying to stop doing. Not saying the real thing because the real thing has risk in it.”
“Hmmm.”
I looked at him.
“I don’t forgive you for everything yet. I don’t expect you to, either. I want to be honest about that. I am not going to tell you it is finished when it isn’t, because honesty is the instrument we have, and I am not going to compromise it for the sake of a cleaner sentence.”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t expect it.”
“But.” I held his gaze. “I love you.”
