Page 62 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

I’m just—I’ll admit it, to no one but myself and the ceiling of this office—I’m stalling. Because explaining means opening the door to the room I keep shut, and letting her see what’s behind it, and whatever Darya does with that information will be entirely out of my control. There is no strategy for it. No contingency. No position of strength from which to deliver it.

There is only the truth, undefended.

I find that, for a man who prides himself on control, the prospect is roughly equivalent to being asked to walk into a gunfight without a weapon.

She’ll come home, I tell myself again.

And again, and again.

Even I can hear, by now, how hollow it’s getting.

***

I’m in the dining room, which is a departure from my recent habit of sequestering myself in the office. I’m there because I’ve been in the office for the better part of a week, and the walls have started to feel like they’re making a point. I’m sitting at the head of the empty table with a bowl of something I’ve been eating without tasting, a stack of documents beside me that I’ve been reading without absorbing, when my mother saunters in.

She doesn’t say anything at first. She takes her usual seat, which feels pointed, given that it’s at the other end of a table that currently has no one between us. She pours herself a glass of water from the carafe. She looks at the documents, then at the barely touched bowl, then at my face.

Then she reaches across and smacks the back of my head.

It isn’t hard enough to hurt. It’s hard enough to be unambiguous.

“Mama—”

“Quiet,” she scolds crisply, setting her glass down. “I’ve been very patient with you, Anton, and now enough is enough.”

“You’ve been—” I splutter, woundedly rubbing the back of my head. “Stasi told you.”

“Yes, of course, Anastasia told me,” she confirms, without a shred of remorse on her behalf or Stasi’s. “She was right to. Somebody had to, since you clearly weren’t going to. She shouldn’t have been the one to have to. You should have come to me days ago. How could you not? And for that matter, how could you let Darya go in the first place?”

I open my mouth.

She looks at me.

I close it.

“She said—” I try again.

“I don’t care what she said.” My mother’s voice is composed, unhurried, the voice of a woman who has made this particular point before and is prepared to make it as many times as necessary. “Whatever she said, Anton. I don’t care. A woman doesn’t leave because she said something. A woman leaves because she needed something and didn’t get it. Those are two entirely different problems, and the second one is yours to fix, my darling.”

“It’s more complicated than—”

“It is never as complicated as you make it.” She says this the way she says most things: as fact, as settled, as a matter she’s already thought through thoroughly and found wanting of any counter-argument. “No woman, no matter how composed, no matter how capable, no matter how infuriatingly self-sufficient—” and here, something almost fond crosses her face, which startles me enough to stop talking “—doesn’t want to be chosen. Fought for. Loved in a way that requires something from the person doing the loving. That’s all it ever is, Anton. That’s the whole of it.”

I look at the table. The grain of the wood. I count it before I can stop myself, and then I stop, deliberately, which takes more effort than it should.

“Get your head out of your ass,” my mother says pleasantly. “It’s a beautiful head. It deserves better than where you’ve put it.”

Despite everything, a tectonic plate in my chest shifts, searching for a better place to fit itself. And my mother sees it. Of course, she sees it. She’s been reading my face since I had one.

She doesn’t leave. She sits and watches me grapple with how far I’ve fallen. How much I’ve fucked up. She refills her glass and then mine, and she settles in with the composure of a woman who has more to say and has decided she’s going to say it. I recognize the posture. I’ve been on the receiving end of it my whole life.

There’s no way to brace myself for this hit.

It’s worse than the thump on the back of my head.

“Do you know what it was like,” she says, “watching you with Irina?”

I don’t like to think about that time. But neither does my mother. I know that. I can see that she aches to talk about it now. If there had been anyone as heartbroken as I’d been over the loss of Irina, it was my mother.