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Aleks may have regretted the memory he brought up, but he was right: Elena had been totally unprepared for my lifestyle. But there’s a chance that Wren might have the steel required to survive in this world.
Bee noticed that in her.
So did my brother.
Maybe it’s time I started noticing, too.
8
DMITRI
She sleeps for almost twenty-four hours straight.
Liza had warned me that that might happen. A combination of mental trauma and physical exhaustion forces the body to just cease operations and reboot. To pass the time, I end up prepping a big meal: pelmeni, pierogi and a hot shchi that reminds me of cold winters in Russia when my grandmother was still alive.
Wren finally peers around the corner just after eight, looking fresh-faced and well-rested. Her hair spills down her shoulders, smelling of oranges, and she happens to be wearing one of the t-shirts I’d put into her closet this morning while she slept.
I might like the sight of her in my t-shirt a little too much.
“Welcome to the waking world.”
She smiles nervously. “I feel like I slept for days.”
“Just one.”
Her eyes pop. “I slept for a whole day?” she balks. “Seriously?”
“You needed the rest. And now, you probably need food.”
She sniffs the air and swallows audibly. “It smells amazing in here. Did you make all this yourself?”
“You already know I can cook.”
“Not like this,” she argues, gesturing to the mountain of soft, juicy pelmeni on the kitchen island. “There’s cooking and then there’s cooking. Are those dumplings?”
Before I can even answer, she crosses the room and perches herself on a stool, swoops on a pelmen, and takes a bite.
The moan that follows is worth every ounce of effort I poured into them.
“How’d you learn all these recipes?” she asks around a mouthful of food.
“My grandmother taught me.” I pull open the drawer under the cutlery cabinet and take out her old recipe notebook, the pages yellowed and crackling. “She left this for me in her will.”
Wren takes the notebook gingerly and leafs through the pages, murmuring softly as she goes. She gets through half the book before she glances up at me. “Were you close?”
I shrug. “In a way. Cooking was her preferred method of conversation. She was a woman of few words. If her nose wasn’t buried in a recipe book, it was buried in a Bible.”
“I can relate to that,” she says with a bitter laugh. “My mom was the same way. She joined a prayer group after Dad left and after that it was all about Jesus, all the time.”
“That must have been lonely.”
She bobs her head left and right. “Yes and no. I had Rose.” She flinches almost immediately after saying Rose’s name. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I didn’t mean to invite the elephant into the room.”
It’s amazing to me that she’s the one apologizing. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. You lost someone, too. I kinda… pushed that aside because I was so focused on the people I lost.”
She tries to pick up her expression unsuccessfully. I prod the plate of pelmeni back towards her. “Eat pelmeni now. We’ll worry about the elephants later.”
