Page 139 of The Dangerous Dance

"You have forty-eight hours," he says. "Think about what you want that to look like."

He goes.

The second and third sessions are not Viktor.

I don't describe them. They are the methodology I documented, applied, and I move through them the way my father taught me to move through the things that have to be moved through — by going somewhere else.

I go to the house in Carroll Gardens.

The kitchen in the morning. The coffee that's better than his because he measures by approximation and I measure by result. The fig tree through the window, bare and slightly reproachful. The east-facing windows on the top floor that get the morning light in the specific way that was the reason he bought the house — he told me that, one morning, quietly, like he was giving me something he hadn't given anyone.

I go to the farmers market on a Saturday. The bread table. The cheese. Gerald at the honey stall with his opinions about buckwheat. A man standing at the edge of the park holding a loaf of rye he was never going to eat before it developed a personality.

I go to the studio, the old one three blocks from the house, the work lights warm against the old brick and the floor good under my feet and him standing in the middle of the room saying you're beautiful with the flat factual weight of someone reporting a truth rather than offering a compliment.

I stay there for a while.

Between the second and third sessions I think about Dara.

I haven't spoken to her since the morning I went back to Viktor. Cover meant no contact — anyone Viktor's network watched could be a risk to her — and so for six days she has been holding what she has been holding without me. She is, I hope, at the safehouse rather than the Astoria apartment. I told Liam before I left that she should be moved to somewhere Viktor's people couldn't reach quickly, and I trust he moved her. I trust that the same way I trust the floor under my feet, which is more than I have ever trusted anything to do with my own safety.

Dara, who told me to do what's best for myself.

Dara, who said come back from this one on the morning I went back, with the practical voice she uses for the things she's most afraid of saying differently.

I am trying, I tell her in my head. I am actively trying.

I think about Mackenzie. About the girl's day that was the most ordinary thing I'd done in years and felt like the most significant. About a girl who brought food because she knew I'd need it and who told me off in the same breath and who said you're welcome here with the ease of someone who means it in all directions.

I think about Ailish. About the specific way she sees things. About you're brave delivered as a fact rather than an encouragement, which is the kind of thing that lands differently from the performed version. About the morning she drove me to wherever I needed to start from, and the way she said he knows when I tried to tell her something to pass along.

He knows.

I think about the car ride home from the gala. The city at night. His arm. I love you and his response, and the specific quality of a man saying a true thing he's been carrying for a long time.

I'm glad I said it when I did.

This is the thing I return to between the sessions, the thing that stays clean and clear while other things are more difficult. I said it in a car on a Friday night because I'd decided to stop waiting for a better moment, and there is no better moment than the one where you say it because you mean it and not because you're afraid you won't get another chance.

I said it from fullness.

Whatever happens in this room, I said it from fullness, and that belongs to me.

At some point I sleep, which is the body making its own decisions. When I wake the cold has deepened, which means time has passed.

I listen.

The rotation outside the door. Two guards, regular intervals, the particular pattern of people who have been given a job they don't expect to be difficult and have settled into its rhythms.

And then, somewhere above me — muffled through the earth and the concrete — a sound that changes the quality of the silence.

Not an interior sound. Something penetrating from outside the building's perimeter. The specific percussion of a situation in which something has begun.

One of the guards says something. I hear the word compound in Russian. I hear the word penetrate. I hear the specific urgency of someone receiving information through an earpiece and recalibrating their position.

I sit up.

I know this sound. I know what it means. I've been in enough operational situations to recognize the specific quality of a perimeter under pressure, the way it changes the atmosphere of a place, the way people who are tasked with guarding something react when the thing they were told wasn't coming turns out to be coming.