Page 41 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“Ask.”

“That’s it? Ask? I had a whole approach. There was going to be flattery.”

“You’ve been circling this table for twenty minutes. My knees are on the floor, and the floor is hard.” He adds another heart to the stack, edges perfectly aligned, because the man cannot perform a sloppy job of anything, including construction paper. “Ask me while I can still stand.”

I roll closer until my footplate touches the table leg, then put my hands in my lap.

“I want the police file on my accident. All of it. The report, the witness statements, the toxicology results, the driver’s entire miserable life.”

His hands stop.

“Why?”

“Because my father stood in the parking lot on Tuesday and told me men were asking about my mother’s name years before Lev ever heard of me. When I asked what he meant by years, he said before your accident. Then he went straight back to asking me for money.”

“And did you give it to him?”

“Not yet, but I probably will.”

Danil does not smile. He picks up the scissors and puts them in the pencil cup with the handles facing up, the correct way, the way I have told twenty-six children at least ninety times.

I hate how much I like him.

“I’ll pull it,” he says. “When you’ve read it, I take it to Lev. That’s not an offer, so don’t work me on it. You get it first. He gets it second. Nobody gets it never.”

“Fine.”

“Say it properly.”

“Nobody gets it never. God, you’re both exhausting. You know he does that with his hands too? That thing where he puts something down and it stays put.”

“Where do you think I learned it?”

He goes back to his felt hearts.

It takes him two days.

Two days of my beautiful frozen penthouse. Coffee made for two. Milk in the little jug. Please and thank you sharpened to a point. My husband takes every word across the marble each morning like a man swallowing glass on doctor’s orders.

There is a mark on the inside of my thigh in the shape of four fingers that has been turning green since Tuesday. Twice, I have caught myself pressing it inside the staff bathroom to find out whether it still answers.

It does.

My body has made its position in this war very clear, but my body can go to hell.

All of that remains true at four on Friday afternoon when Danil enters my empty classroom with a folder beneath one arm and closes the door with his heel.

He does not sit. He stands beside the reading rug with his hands behind his back while I open the file across my knees under a dusting of glitter.

Dennis Kilroy.

Fifty-one years old. Ozone Park. Box truck. Blood-alcohol level of point two four, which the report describes as consistent with severe impairment. Anyone who has attended a school fundraiser knows that means a man who could not find his own car in a parking lot containing nine vehicles.

“No prior arrests,” I read.

“None. Not a traffic ticket in nineteen years. Not a parking summons.” Danil looks through the window instead of at me. “Clean license, clean record, decades of nothing. Then that.”

“He bought the truck six weeks before the accident. Cash.”