“Kostin’s in town,” Vika says. “I thought you’d be trapped with him.”
“He’ll survive.”
She laughs as if that’s charming.
Katerina is still watching me, and there’s too much in it for a simple greeting. Suspicion. Annoyance. Curiosity. Something left over from the corridor and the pier and every unfinished second since Moscow.
It makes the whole room feel smaller.
Vika says something else, but I barely hear it. Katerina shifts her weight near the window, the late afternoon light catching in her hair, and I think again that I’ve had days to stop thinking about her and have failed at it completely.
Then she says, very dryly, “Well. Since you’re here, I assume someone should pretend to be pleased.”
And just like that, I know this is going to be a long afternoon.
Katerina leaves five minutes after I get there.
She does it neatly, almost politely. One cool look at me, one flat answer to something Vika says, then she turns to the maid and says she has to check on the children.
I watch her go.
Instead, I sit there while Vika keeps talking and feel disappointment settle into me hard enough to be irritating. Not because she left the room. Because I know she left because I’m in it.
Vika keeps going.
About some charity dinner, some woman she hates, some designer she thinks copied a dress from Paris. She talks the way some people drink, steadily and for longer than anyone around them wants.
I answer when I have to. But mostly I don’t.
The whole time, I’m listening for footsteps that don’t come back.
Then Vika’s phone rings.
She glances at the screen and makes a face. “If this is my mother, tell her I died beautifully.”
I don’t answer.
She stands anyway, already swiping to accept the call, and drifts toward the hall with one hand over the receiver, still talking before the line properly connects.
The second she’s gone, I get up.
The house is too quiet in that expensive way old houses are. Thick carpets. Closed doors. Voices softened by distance and wood and too much money. I walk without hurrying, because men who belong in houses like this never hurry unless someone is bleeding.
Then I hear the piano. Soft at first. A few notes, then the line of a melody I know too well.
I stop in the middle of the corridor.
No.
For a second, I think I’m imagining it. My mind reaching backward the way it has been doing too often since the lunch, since the pier, since I looked at a little boy and had to force myself not to think too clearly.
Then the melody comes again, fuller this time, and I know exactly what it is.
The song from Moscow. The one we danced to.
I follow the sound down the hall and up the smaller staircase toward the back of the house.
The music leads me to a sitting room I haven’t seen before. Smaller than the front rooms. Warmer. Bookshelves, low lamps, a fire burning down to embers, and in the corner, a black grand piano.
