Page 104 of Captured By the Pakhan

And I laugh so hard my hip hurts.

We land in Los Angeles at nine that night, and Sergei is on the steps before the car has stopped, because Bogdan flew him back from Suffolk two days ago and he has been at that window since four in the afternoon.

He hits me at about waist height and knocks the breath out of me.

"You came back⁠—"

"I came back."

"You said in the letter you'd tell me and not the bed and then you didn't⁠—"

"I know. I broke it. I told you I broke it on purpose, and I'm not going to apologize for that, because it was the right thing, but you get to be angry about it for as long as you want."

He thinks about this, with his arms still round me.

"Two days," he decides.

"That's very generous."

"Okay, three."

We tell him in the kitchen, at half past nine at night, with all four of us standing up.

He bursts into tears immediately, which nobody expects, and then apologizes for crying, which absolutely wrecks his father.

And then he wipes his face with the back of his hand and looks at me and says, in a voice of enormous seriousness:

"Am I allowed to help choose the name?"

Chapter 27

Raven

Los Angeles, 10:20 PM

It takes eleven days for the house to become a home.

That's the part nobody tells you about the evolution of something like this. Bogdan takes the stitches out of Ilya's side on the Tuesday and tells him he is a fortunate and extremely stupid man. My hip stops being a problem and becomes a thing that aches when it rains, which apparently it will do for the rest of my life. Sergei goes back to being loud at breakfast.

My furniture is in four rooms, and I have not moved any of it, because it turns out I do not care where the sofa is, and this is information about myself I would rather not have received.

Yeremey arrives on Thursday and hugs me before I can do anything about it.

"You are much shorter than I expected," he says, delighted. "He described you as tall. He is a liar, and I have always said so."

"He talks about me?"

"Ms West," Yeremey says, "since the first week of March that man has said perhaps four hundred words to me about freight."

We are eleven days into it before the two of us are alone in a room with nothing else happening.

That's not an accident, and we both know it. There has been a courthouse, a boy, an aircraft, and a man with stitches, and underneath all of it, running the entire time, is a folder in a drawer that hasn't been mentioned once.

Then, on the Sunday, he puts a box on the kitchen island.

"Everything," Ilya says. "The originals, the copies, the digital, and the card. The photographs, the list, and the pages about Foster."

I look at it.