Page 8 of A Surprise Baby for the Russian

I lay out the ground rules over the next hour. She will stay. She will make no attempts to leave. I spell this out clearly, without embellishment; she listens, but I know full well she’s going to be trouble. I can see in her face she’s memorizing the list so she can work through it systematically, destroying it point by point.

She attempts to leave for the first time later that afternoon. I am in the bathroom when I hear the front door. I get there in under four seconds, but she has still made it approximately three steps down the front path. I say her name. She freezes, then turns around, attempting her most innocent smile. “I was only getting some air.”

“Inside, now.”

“I need air, Yakov. I am a person who requires oxygen.”

“There’s a garden at the back.”

She barges past me back inside and goes straight to the kitchen, where she fills a glass of water and drinks the entire thing, looking out of the window at the garden, obviously planning her next move. She tries again a couple of hours later. This time she gets as far as the gate before I’m behind her. I don’t touch her, even though I’m desperate to; the pull of it is something I have accepted as a condition of being close to her. Instead, I simply say: “Raya.” She stops with her hand on the gate and doesn’t turn around. “I was going to—”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to give me a reason why stepping outside the perimeter of this property is a good idea. It isn’t. You need to trust me on this.” She spins around, directing her fury at me. “You are insufferable,” she tells me.

“I know.”

“You know, and you don’t care, even slightly?”

“I care, Raya, very much so. That’s why we’re here. My job is making sure you don’t get hurt, so let me do it.” She holds my gaze, then she lets go of the gate and walks back past me toward the house. She’s close enough that I catch the scent of her hair as she passes, and I stand there and look at the gate and breathe through my nose for a moment before I follow her.

I make pasta for dinner. The cupboards are stocked for exactly this kind of contingency, weeks’ worth of store cupboard essentials to ensure I can at least put something together that is edible for the first few days while I get the lie of the land. She sits at the kitchen table and watches me move around the kitchen.

“You can cook?” She attempts small talk, which I’m appreciative of. I’ve waited so long to be able to talk to her that I’ll take anything that’s not anger.

“I can do a lot of things.”

“Should I be worried about what else is on the list?”

“You may like what else is on the list.”

She snorts as I put the food on the table and sit down next to her. She looks at the empty chairs on the other side of the table and then at me and clearly decides an argument over seating arrangements is not worth having right now; no doubt she’s saving her energy for whatever else she feels like busting my balls over.. I find this interesting. I find everything about her interesting, and now I’ve got a lifetime to learn everything there is about her.

“So, what happens now?” she asks, twisting pasta around her fork.

“We stay here for a while. I can work from here. You settle in.”

“Settle in?” she repeats, like she can’t believe the words that have come out of my mouth. “Yakov, I have none of my things. I have the clothes I was wearing when you very definitely kidnapped me and three paperback novels.”

“I’ll take you to get what you need tomorrow.”

She looks up. “Outside? Really?”

“The drugstore and a clothing shop. We’ll be quick.”

As she eats, I can see her turning this over, trying to figure out whether it’s a real offer or some kind of test. It’s neither. She needs things, and I will spend a lifetime giving them to her, even if she doesn’t realize it yet. I want her to be comfortable, to feel at home, because she is at home as long as she’s with me.

“Fine,” she says. “But I’m choosing my own things.”

“I assumed.”

“And if you try to tell me what to pick, I will make your life considerably more difficult.”

“I don’t doubt you for a second.” I don’t. I’ve seen how feisty she can get. She looks at me like she’s not sure if I’m being sincere or if I’m teasing her. I am being sincere. I will always be sincere with her, which is not a quality I ever imagined myself cultivating.

I take her to the small main street the next morning. I keep close, closer than she’d like; I can tell from the occasional sideways look she gives me as I position myself between her and the street, but she doesn’t say anything. She quickly picks up what she needs from the drugstore, without comment, which tells me she’s aware of my concerns and has decided not to fight. The clothing shop takes longer, which is no surprise. I know from my calls with Selene how much the girls enjoy shopping. She moves through the rails with purpose, selecting what she wants. I stand slightly behind her and to the right, watching the shop, the door, and her in equal measure, which is harder than it sounds because looking at Raya from any angle requires a deliberate act of will to stop.