Page 54 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

Haunting is the only word for it. What else is it, when I drift from room to room with no particular destination, wrapped in a cardigan I found in my old wardrobe that’s two sizes too large—Valentin’s, probably, left behind from some visit years ago—and I let the house hold me? That’s what houses are for, when they’re the right kind of house. Not every building can do it. The Zakharov manor would never be able to do it for me, least of all now.

My townhouse in Beacon Hill is mine, meticulously and completely mine, and I love it—but not like this. That’s why it had been so much easier to leave it to shack up with Anton, for the bigger picture. I couldn’t imagine leaving the Yuri estate behind, ever.

This house holds me the way arms do.

A feeling that doesn’t dissipate when I find myself in Trifon’s study at one point, unable to ignore that my brothers are tense about something beyond me. I’ve caught the clipped edges of Trifon’s voice through the walls more than once. Valentin has been disappearing a bunch on missions, no doubt. The security detail has doubled, just like Janella said. The mole is still out there.

But I’m here, standing in front of the wall of photographs he’s never taken down despite claiming to find them embarrassing: each of us Yuri children at various ages, captured in various states of chaos. There’s one of Nadya and me, eleven and twelve years old respectively, squinting into the sun outside what I recognize as the dacha we used to visit in the summers.

Nadya is missing a front tooth.

I am holding her hand with the particular grip of an older sister who has decided, without being asked, that she is responsible for this small, feral creature. I don’t need to go looking for more recent photographic evidence to know this hasn’t changed, even if we traded the role now and again, especially when she gets me drunk on Strawberry Daiquiris and makes me discuss my sexual escapades.

I stand there for a long time, looking at that photograph.

And I think about how I’ve spent so much of my life being purposeful. It’s the quality I rely on most, the thing that’s never failed me; the foundation beneath every other thing I’ve built. I’m certain about my work, my taste, and my judgment. I’m certain about my family and what I’d do for them—which is anything, anything at all.

I’d even been certain, walking into this marriage, about exactly what it was and what it wasn’t and what I would and wouldn’t allow it to become.

At what point had that stopped being true?

What I hadn’t accounted for was how quietly certainty can shift. How you can look up one day and find yourself completely, irrevocably certain about something you never intended to be certain about and have no stand-out memory of the moment it happened.

I put my finger on the glass over the photograph of that twelve-year-old girl holding her little sister’s hand, so sure of herself and her responsibilities and the shape of her love.

She’d have liked Anton, too, I think. The one from his stories. Complicated, protective, gallant young boy. She’d think he was magnificent, and she’d walk right up to him, and she’d refuse to leave him alone until he admitted it.

Before he turned into a man who couldn’t fight for the right things.

I don’t know how to articulate how he’s betrayed me. It’s a small mercy that no one asks me to. My brothers orbit me with the careful consideration of men who know better, though it’s hilarious that they all pop up, despite all having their own homes. Out of nowhere, Iosif brings me tea without being asked. Later, Miron makes a point of sitting near me in the evenings without speaking, which is so profoundly out of character for him that it almost makes me laugh. Almost.

Janella calls ahead to ask if she should come, and I tell her I’m fine. She says okay and comes anyway, and sits in the kitchen with me for two hours, talking about nothing, and I’m so grateful for it I could weep.

I don’t weep, though. I don’t let myself. I’ve wept enough. I’ve established a personal quota, and I intend to honor it.

What I am, underneath the wallowing—underneath the Victorian widow routine, the haunting, the cardigan, the tea I keep accepting and only half-drinking—is hurt. Hurt in a way that feels new to me, which is its own indignity, because I’d thought I knew the full range of what hurt could feel like.

Evidently, I’ve been underestimating it.

As it turns out, there’s a register of pain only accessible to people who’ve let someone in past the point of easy retreat, and I’d let Anton in past that point without noticing I was doing it, and now here I am, existing in a frequency I don’t have a name for yet.

I don’t call him.

I pick up the phone approximately eleven times over the course of two days, and I put it back down each time, and I tell myself it’s because I have nothing to say to him, and then I tell myself it’s because I have too much, and then I tell myself the most honest version, which is that I’m afraid. That, if I hear his voice right now, whatever it is I’m holding myself together with will give way entirely, and I don’t know what I’ll be on the other side of that.

***

Three days into my mission to wallow, Yulia finds me. Or hell, maybe I’ve found her.

She’s been pretty occupied with patients, and that’s been fine with me. It’s given me plenty of time to dote on her daughter, my niece, lovely Zinaida, whom I never see enough of for my liking.

I’ve wandered into the small sitting room off the back of the house that no one really uses anymore, that still has the ancient loveseat Trifon’s never gotten rid of because his first memory is of falling asleep on it—and she’s already there, legs tucked beneath her, a medical journal open in her lap.

She looks up when I appear in the doorway.

“Hello, stranger,” she says.

“Hi there,” I say.