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“You telling her this?” Yuri asks.

“Haven’t decided yet.”

“Didn’t you tell her you’d give her everything going forward? After Tomas?”

“I know what I told her.” I keep my eyes on the fence. “I found out two minutes before you asked me that question. Give me the night to figure out how I want to handle it.”

Yuri doesn’t push it further. He just nods once and goes back to studying the fence line with me, the two of us quiet for a while after that.

I finish the perimeter walk alone after he heads back toward the house, running the same argument through my head that I’ve been running since he raised it.

There’s a real difference between withholding the existence of a threat and withholding the granular texture of how that threat is currently behaving. I believe that distinction holds up under scrutiny.

I also know, somewhere underneath the belief, that it’s the kind of distinction a man reaches for when he wants permission to keep managing information rather than actually surrendering the habit entirely.

I think about the terrace, about how certain I was that night that something in me had actually changed. It felt real at the time. It still feels real, mostly, except for this one thread I’m already tugging loose before the promise has even had a full month to prove itself. That’s the part that unsettles me more than the Sokolov threat itself does right now: the speed at which old habits reassert themselves the moment the stakes climb high enough.

I find Harper in the kitchen making tea when I get back inside. She looks up at me.

“How’d it go out there?”

“Fine. Marek’s got the east gate reinforced; cameras are up.” I lean against the counter. “Nothing new.”

“Nothing new,” she repeats, watching me a second too long.

“Nothing new,” I say again, and hate how easy the lie comes out.

She doesn’t push. Just nods and goes back to the kettle.

I should tell her what Yuri found out tonight. I don’t. I tell myself I’ll wait until there’s something more solid to give her, not just a rumor about Viktor going quiet. It’s a decent enough excuse on its own. I don’t fully buy it either.

Later, alone in the study, I go through the patrol logs twice and don’t take a word of them. I already know what I’m actually sitting with. I promised her the truth, all of it, and tonight I picked the version where I get to decide what she’s ready to hear. That’s the same thing I used to do before I promised her anything different.

30

HARPER

I’m twenty weeks pregnant now, and the mornings have finally stopped making me sick, which feels like its own small holiday I didn’t know I was waiting for. Yuri read me the app update the last time he brought my phone by. A banana this week, apparently, whatever that’s supposed to mean to someone who hasn’t seen fresh produce in this house long enough to remember what one actually looks like.

During those visits, I go through my notifications too, and I post something small when Artem allows it, a mirror selfie, a caption about staying busy with work, anything that keeps people from wondering too hard about where I’ve disappeared to. Months now, and nobody’s come looking. Nobody’s noticed enough to ask.

Caleb’s page is the one I check first every time, and it’s always the same thing. Beach trip with his wife last week. Poppy in a sunhat, laughing at something off-camera. A caption about how blessed he feels, three exclamation points, like his life hasn’t so much as paused since I disappeared out of it.

I like the photo of Poppy. I don’t like the rest of it.

I’ve started a routine I actually look forward to: coffee substitute in hand, a slow walk around the garden before the day gets too warm, the baby announcing itself now with small flutters I’ve only just started to identify as movement instead of imagination.

I stop on the path most mornings and just stand there, hand pressed flat against my stomach, waiting to feel it again, patient in a way I’ve never really been about anything else in my life.

“Still there?” Artem asks one morning, coming up beside me on the path, and I don’t know how long he’s been watching before he said anything, some quiet amusement in his voice at catching me mid-ritual again.

“Still there.” I take his hand and press it against the same spot, and we stand together a moment, waiting, until something flutters again and his whole face changes, something unguarded breaking through in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times since I’ve known him.

“That’s incredible,” he says, quiet, like he’s talking mostly to himself.

I used to feel exposed by moments like this, watched in a way that made me want to cover up and disappear.

Now I mostly feel proud, the two things sitting close enough together sometimes that I can’t fully separate them, but proud winning out more often than it used to, especially in mornings like this one, sunlight cutting through the garden, his hand warm against mine.