1
CELINE
The eggs are burning.Our smoke alarm has a short in it, and instead of beeping, it makes this low, defeated whine, and it’s been going for six minutes while Lena sits at the kitchen table in her robe, telling me about a dream she had where she was a marine biologist living in Portugal.
“You were there too,” she says. “You kept trying to speak Portuguese, and it was embarrassing for everyone involved.”
I flip the eggs. They are, in fact, destroyed. I plate them because she needs the protein, and she has never once in twenty-three years complained about food. It’s the one quality she has that I would describe as saintlike.
She looks at the plate. Then at me. “These are cremated.”
“Eat them.”
She eats them.
This house smells like old wood and the dish soap our mother used to buy in bulk from the store on Mercer. I’ve never checked if they still make it. I buy the same bottle every time withoutchecking the label, and I intend to keep doing so for as long as the option exists.
Lena is talking again, filling the kitchen with whatever is running through her head. I used to find it overwhelming before I understood it was her way of keeping me out of my own numbers in the morning. She knows I do that.
Today’s numbers are not good.
Not catastrophic. Not yet. But the last round of treatment pushed the credit balance somewhere that makes me do the math twice when I wake up, just to confirm it’s real. It’s always real. Debt doesn’t revise itself overnight out of consideration for your feelings.
“You’re doing the thing,” Lena says.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’ve stirred that coffee four times, and you haven’t tasted it.”
I drink it. It’s cold.
She watches me with those steady eyes she has, too calm for someone who spent two days in the hospital three weeks ago while I sat in a plastic chair in a corridor that smelled like antiseptic and learned in precise detail how small the wordhelplesscan make a person feel.
She looked fine that morning too. That’s the cruelty of lupus. It gives her good days that look indistinguishable from health, right up until it doesn’t.
The house around us holds the morning the way it always has. Our parents bought it before we were born, paid it off slowly, and left it to us in a will that was two pages long andsurprisingly organized for two people who kept their documents in a shoebox.
It’s not a large house. The floors creak in three spots, and the second bathroom has water pressure that’s more of a recommendation. But it is ours, without mortgage, without condition, which is the single reason I’m not completely underwater.
Lena doesn’t want me to sell it. I raised the idea twice, and both times she ended the conversation with one look.
The second time, she said she didn’t want me left with nothing if the worst happened, said it plainly. I told her to stop talking. She said she was being practical. I told her I was aware of what she was being. We didn’t speak for the rest of that evening.
By morning, she’d made coffee and left it on my side of the table, and we never brought it up again.
I rinse my cup, kiss the top of her head, and go fix my hair.
Volkov Holdings doesn’t have its name on the outside of the building. Just a street number in brushed steel beside the door, the kind of understatement that belongs to organizations that have never needed to advertise themselves.
The building sits on Park Avenue and is the kind you look up at rather than across, glass and steel going quiet and deliberate into the midtown skyline.
This is my third time here. Final stage.
The lobby is cool and smells like expensive candles and money, or maybe money just smells like expensive candles. The floors are pale marble. The chairs in the waiting area are cream-colored and look like furniture nobody is meant to actually use.
Behind the reception desk is Oliver, who introduced himself at my first interview with the energy of someone who had been waiting specifically for my arrival. He has immaculate eyebrows, an expressive face with no setting for neutral, and opinions about everything which he has so far chosen to share with me freely.
He looks up from his monitor and takes me in. “Ten minutes early,” he says. “Every single time. Consistency is a love language.”
