Page 23 of Marrying the Pakhan

“Thank you,” she says. “For giving in on the pizza thing. You didn’t have to.”

“It’s pizza. I think I can survive it twice in one week.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She leans against the doorframe, and the robe shifts slightly, and I keep my eyes exactly where they belong through pure effort of will. “You’ve been doing that a lot. Giving in on the small stuff. It matters more than you probably realize.”

“I’m aware it matters.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to, and it makes her go quiet for a second, studying me. I look away first, busying myself with plates I don’t actually need to arrange.

It would be easy to close the distance between us right now, kitchen, low light, both of us tired enough to stop pretending the last few weeks haven’t rearranged what this was supposed to be.

I don’t. Not with her daughter twelve feet away drawing something that looks like it might be a cat, not with the memory of a courthouse hallway still sitting unresolved between us.

But it doesn’t get easier, wanting her like this, under my own roof, in a robe she has no idea is doing to me exactly what those photographs did the first night I saw her face.

Dinner passes easier than I expect, Ginger narrating her drawing in exhaustive detail. A cat, it turns out, riding what she insists is a dragon and not a horse, an important distinction she repeats twice.

Harper asks questions I can tell are genuine and not just performed patience, and for a stretch of forty minutes I forget entirely that any of this started as a transaction.

At one point Ginger asks me if I have a favorite animal, and I tell her wolves, mostly because it’s true and partly because I want to see what she does with it.

“Wolves are pack animals,” she informs me, with the total authority of someone who read this fact recently and has been waiting for a reason to share it. “They don’t like being alone.”

“No,” I say. “They don’t.”

Harper catches my eye across the table for a second before looking away.

By the time Ginger’s ready for bed, she asks for me specifically, which still catches me off guard every time it happens.

“Two chapters,” she says, holding up the book with the dragon on it, an old negotiating tactic she’s clearly used successfully before. “Not one.”

“We’ll see how tired you get.”

“That’s not a no.”

“No,” I admit. “It’s not.”

I sit on the edge of her bed and read, doing the voices badly, worse than Harper does them by her own admission, and Ginger corrects my dragon voice twice before agreeing it’s close enough to be acceptable.

“That’s not how he sounds,” she informs me, halfway through the first chapter.

“How’s he supposed to sound?”

“Bigger. And kind of sad, because nobody likes him even though he’s nice.”

I adjust accordingly, dropping my voice lower, and she nods, satisfied, and settles back against her pillow like she’s just successfully directed a very important production.

By the third chapter her eyes are heavier, blinking longer each time, and she doesn’t seem bothered at all that I’m not Harper.

She’s asleep before the chapter ends, one hand still resting on the page like she’s trying to hold the story in place even unconscious.

I sit there a minute longer than I need to, watching her breathe.

I’ve spent fifteen years building a life that runs on distance, on making sure nothing matters enough to be used against me.

But I’ve let a child into the one place I always kept empty on purpose.

It should worry me more than it does.

Dimitri’s waiting downstairs when I come back down, a beer already open on the counter, and the look on his face that means business, not personal business.