At my door he released my arm.
“I will make the arrangements,” he said. “You will not require your phone for the moment.” He held out his hand.
I gave it to him. The ordinary phone, the one with Dottie’s messages and the text thread with Jared and the Barnes Foundation website I had looked at sixteen times in the last week. I placed it in his palm and watched him put it in his jacket pocket with the same deliberate care with which he had returned the manifest to its drawer.
“Rest,” he said. As though this were a kindness.
The lock engaged behind him. The sound of it turning was different from the night just a few weeks ago. That had been softer, a quiet click that spoke of a reminder. This sound. This was one that carried weight. It was one I’d last heard when I was sixteen and had come home from a concert I’d attended without permission and he had decided a lesson was required. A lesson about unquestioned authority, unrivaled power.
I stood in the center of my room and listened to his footsteps recede down the corridor.
Then I sat on the floor.
Not the bed.
The floor, because the floor was solid and real and right now I needed something solid and real under me.
Ne sluchayno.
Not an accident.
I had always known. That was the worst of it. The knowledge that had been living in the back of my mind since I was ten years old and had stood in the hallway of our Moscow house and listened to the servants through the gap in the kitchen door, storing up words I didn’t fully understand yet because my mother had taught me that knowledge was the thing they couldn’t take from you and I had been collecting it ever since.
She had been right about that. She had been wrong about everything being survivable.
I sat with it for a long time. Her face, the real one, not the photographs he had left after the purge, but the one I carried that was entirely my own, the one of her laughing at something I had said, her hand over her mouth, her eyes bright and specific and alive in the way that photographs never quite captured. The one I had been keeping safe in a room in my mind where he couldn’t reach.
She had never gotten to choose.
Not her life. Not her exit. Not whether the rain on the mountain road was rain.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and sat with that for a moment that had no particular length to it.
Then I remembered the burner phone.
It was in the drawer of the nightstand where I had put it the morning after he’d left it, tucked under a book in the way of someone who had understood instinctively that it required concealment. My father had taken my regular phone. He had not searched my room. That particular violation had never been his style, he preferred the surveillance of restriction to the surveillance of intrusion, and so it was still there.
My hands were shaking. I noted this with a distant clinical interest, the way you noted a physical fact about someone else’s body.
I dialed.
He answered before the second ring.
“Polina.” Something in his voice, the way he said my name, almost undid me. Almost.
“I need you to know something,” I said. My voice was entirely steady. I had my mother’s voice when I needed it, the one that held no matter what was happening underneath. “I can’t see you anymore.”
Silence.
“He’s sending me back to Russia,” I said. “There’s a man. Roman Davidof. My father has chosen him for me.” My throat tightened but I forced it to relax.
“I’m coming.” His voice was flat and immediate. “Right now. Don’t—“
“No.” The word came out quiet and absolute. “No, Jared. Listen to me.” I could hear him listening, the silence of a man already calculating outcomes. “If I disappear from this house, the first thing he’d do is find out who I disappeared with. Youunderstand what that means for someone like him.” I took a breath. “What he does with that information.”
“I can handle—“
“I know you think you can,” I said. “You are the only person who has ever asked me what I want. So this is what I want. I want you to be safe.” I took a breath. “Please.”
