Looks at me. “I have to go,” he says.
My chest does a slow, stupid collapse. “Okay. When do you—when will you be back?”
He doesn’t answer that.
My hands grip the doorframe. “Maxim.”
“Daniil will drive you.” He picks up his keys from the hook by the bar. “Your ID cleared last night. You’re free to go.”
The pretense stings.
Free. The word is like a grease splatter burning through layers of skin.
“That’s it.” My voice holds steadier than the rest of me. “Three days and that’s it.”
“That was always it,” he snarls. But then a breath, and all the fire is out. Extinguished by the cold ice block he has become. He meets my eyes, and his are level and dark and give me absolutely nothing. “I told you. Before any of it. And you agreed”
“I know what you told me.” I square my shoulders, pulling the borrowed shirt tighter around me. “I’m asking what this was. The breakfast. The—” My throat closes. I push past it. “You washed my hair.”
His expression cracks, then reseals. Fast. Gone. A wall of reinforced steel where a man had stood.
“I told you what I could offer.” His voice is even. Absolutely, devastatingly even. “No revision. I meant that.”
“I’m not asking for revision. I’m asking—” I stop. What I’m asking and what he’s telling me don’t live in the same world. They never did. I knew that. I knew it going in, knew it when he fed me berries and when he let me touch his scar and when he held me all night with my face cradled on his chest. “Never mind.”
I'm not going to be the one who begs. Cracks. Cries. Although all of those things are bubbling dangerously close to the surface. I said I could do this, and I will.
I get dressed in the bedroom alone. Zara’s gown from the party, mocks me. My hands are steady. I decide they’ll stay steady. When I come out, he’s still at the window, his back to me, a silhouette cut from the bright skyline.
I cross to the door and stop with my hand on the frame. “For what it’s worth,” I say, without turning around, “you’re not as good at this as you think you are.”
“At what.”
“Not caring.” I stare at the brushed-steel door. “And for all of your rules about truth, I think nobody lies more than you.”
I leave before he can answer.
Daniil is in the lobby with a car already waiting, because Daniil is always exactly where he needs to be, and the drive back across the city is gray and quiet and long. The seat is leather, and cold.
He will hear about this trip so I don’t cry.
I sit in the back seat of a car that isn’t mine and never could be, and I watch my city go past the window and understand something I didn’t understand before. It’s not the hollow that gets me. The hollow I knew. The hollow I’ve been living with for twenty-two years—I know how to manage it.
What I don’t know how to manage is having had the window open. Having felt, even for a short time span what it would mean to be on the inside. Having been seen, and fed, and washed, and held. And now having to go back. He was right about all of it. That’s the part that makes it so hard.
He told me exactly who he was and exactly what this was, and I walked into it with my eyes open but with a heart that only saw what it wanted…
4
Maxim
Laura's folder has been on my laptop for a year. I haven’t named it. Named things become real things, and I’ve spent twelve months not making this real. It lives between a Rafail operations file and a Boston property ledger, no label, no identifier, just a folder that I open at odd hours and tell myself is due diligence and not surveillance. Security. Standard monitoring of anyone in the family’s orbit.
I stopped believing myself about six months ago.
Tonight it’s open to Tremont Street. Third floor. Her window, lit at eleven p.m. The camera catches her moving through the apartment—the shadow of her shifts behind the curtain, that restless back-and-forth she does when she can’t sleep, checking the street like she’s waiting for someone. I know her schedule. I know she takes her coffee with cream, two pours exactly. I know she grades papers at the kitchen table on Tuesdays and Thursdays and listens to something with a beat on weekends. I know her route to school; her preferred grocery store, the coffeeshop two blocks from the building where she goes on Saturday mornings and sits by the window with a book.
Daniil knocks on my door around midnight. He takes one look at the closed screen and says nothing for a moment. He collects information the way other men collect grievances—quietly, with excellent memory, and enough patience to deploy it when it will do the most damage.
