I should interrupt, redirect, put distance back between them, gather the children, remind all three of us that this is not normal and cannot become normal.
Instead, I sit there listening to my son and the man who should never have met him discuss boats while my daughter steals olives off Roman’s plate and Elena quietly orders another coffee like this is all an ordinary afternoon.
And the worst part is that I don’t hate it.
I hate that I don’t hate it.
Because there is something so easy in the way he is with them. Not soft, exactly. Roman is not soft. But there is patience in him with them that he does not offer adults. Sofia tests him constantly, and he lets her. Nikolai studies him like a puzzle, and Roman does not rush to solve anything for him.
Once, while I’m looking down at my untouched salad, Sofia slips her hand into his.
Just like that.
Her little fingers curl around one of his, and Roman goes still for the briefest second.
I see it. No one else does.
He recovers immediately, but not before something in his face changes. Not his expression. Something lower. Older. The kind of thing men probably don’t know is visible unless someone has spent enough time wanting them to memorize those small shifts.
My chest tightens.
He lifts Sofia’s hand and looks at the sticky patch of ketchup on her wrist. “You’re very messy.”
“No,” she says. “I’m artistic.” She laughs and leans against his arm like she has known him forever.
I look away because the sight is too strange, too intimate, too dangerous in its own quiet little way. A child trusting a man she should not know. A man letting her. The shape of something almost ordinary trying to form itself in the middle of this ridiculous, compromised lunch.
When I look back, Nikolai is watching Roman too.
Not smiling.
Not suspicious either.
Just looking with that solemn, unnerving focus that makes adults underestimate him right up until he says something that cuts too close.
“You don’t talk down to us,” he says.
Roman’s eyes shift to him. “Would you like me to?”
“No.”
“Then I won’t.”
Nikolai nods, satisfied.
I know my children. Sofia attaches easily, generously, with all the reckless confidence of a loved little girl. But Nikolai is different. He gives his trust in pieces. Watching him hand even a small piece of it to Roman makes something painful and complicated rise in me.
Because I want this.
Not the mess. Not the risk. Not the chaos that would follow if the wrong truth came out. But this. Roman sitting at a lunch table with my children, answering their strange little questions and looking at them as if they matter.
It’s such a stupid thing to want that I almost feel angry with myself for it.
And then Sofia says, “You should come to our house.”
I nearly choke.
Roman’s eyes flick to mine immediately.
