I went upstairs to change.
**************
Dinner was at 7 pm, as usual.
Anya was already there when I came in.
She was at the table with a glass of wine and her phone, the particular posture of a person who had arrived early and was comfortable being the first one in a room. She looked up when I entered and smiled, which was warmer than her operational smile and more careful than the smile she used with her brothers.
“You look like you’ve had a day,” she said.
“Is it that obvious?” I inquired, chuckling casually.
She tilted her head slightly.
“Only to me. And possibly Mikhail.” She paused. “He has a particular way of seeing people that most people don’t notice.”
Which doesn’t help my situation, sister-in-law.
I sat across from her and picked up the wine that Mariya had already placed at my setting.
“I know,” I said.
Anya looked at me for a moment.
“How was your friend?”
“Good,” I said. “It was good to see her.”
“Sofia.” She said the name with the ease of someone who had been briefed rather than introduced. “Mikhail mentioned she’s been with you since the early days at The Constellation.”
“Three years,” I said. “She’s–she knows me. The way that people know you after enough time and enough shared experience. She doesn’t need context, mostly.”
“That’s rare,” she said.
“Yes.”
“We didn’t give you any of that when you arrived here,” she said. “Context, I mean. The house, the family, the–all of it. You were dropped into the middle of it and expected to navigate.” She paused. “I want you to know that I’ve been aware of that. And that it was wrong of us. Of him.” She glanced at the doorway. “He would disagree with the characterization, but it was.”
I looked at her.
“You’ve done remarkably well,” she said, which was not warm so much as accurate, delivered in the register of a woman who gave assessments rather than compliments. “Better than I would have. Better than most people would have. That’s not nothing.”
Something in my chest tightened. I thought about Alexei in the library this morning, pressing what had happened to me before I arrived in this house–the specific construction of it, the way it had been aimed at this specific outcome. I thought about Anya’s face at the ceremony with the complicated expression she had not shared and which I had not asked about.
I thought about what she would say if she knew.
“Thank you,” I said, and picked up my wine.
Mikhail arrived at dinner nine minutes after 7 pm.
He came in the way he came into rooms–without announcing himself, the space simply reorganizing around his presence. He looked at me when he entered, the specific look that had become familiar enough that I had stopped feeling its full weight every time and had started receiving it as a baseline.
He passed the bread to Anya when she reached for it. He responded to Alexei’s call. He told Anya something about a legal matter she had flagged that needed his signature, and he would have it for her tomorrow. He was entirely himself, conducting the dinner the way he conducted everything–with full and controlled competence, nothing missing, nothing excess.
And twice, in the course of the meal, he looked at me.
Not the baseline look. Something different–a longer duration, a quality of attention that had a different depth to it, the distinction between seeing and reading. The first time I felt it, I was mid-sentence in a conversation with Anya about the show, and I looked up and found his eyes on me. I held them for a moment and looked away, and my pulse did the thing it had been doing all afternoon.
