Page 36

He sighs, but he takes a box from the cupboard under the sink and sets it on the island. I pull his hand toward me across the marble and turn it over under the light.

The cuts are deeper than I thought. Two of them, ragged across the knuckles, with tiny glittering pieces of headlight still caught in one.

“You walked around a clinic with glass in your hand,” I say.

“I was busy.”

I frown. “Doing what?”

“Watching you.”

I don't look up. I pick up the tweezers and start pulling glass out of his skin one piece at a time. He doesn't flinch. Not once. I'm fairly sure I could take his whole hand off and he'd just keep looking at me with that same calm, patient face.

“Does it get easier?” I ask quietly.

He's quiet for a moment. “It gets quieter,” he says.

I drop a piece of glass into the dish. “Was it like this for you? The first time?”

“I was nineteen. I threw up behind a car and then went home and didn't sleep for three days.” His thumb moves, very slightly, against the inside of my wrist. “You stood in the rain and complained about your dress.”

“I really did like that dress.”

“So did I,” he says.

I look up.

There's no judgment in his face. No fear, either. He's looking at me the same way he looked at me across his kitchen at three in the morning. Across a restaurant table. Across the yard tonight, with blood on my coat and his own knuckles bleeding.

Like I'm exactly what he expected.

Like I'm exactly what he wanted.

I look back down quickly and pour antiseptic over the cuts. He hisses through his teeth. It's deeply satisfying.

“Sorry,” I say, not sorry at all.

“Liar.”

I wrap his hand in gauze. Neatly, the way Dr. Petrenko taught us all when we were teenagers and Papa decided his daughters should know how to deal with a wound. When I'm done, I tape the end down and smooth it with my thumb.

I don't let go of his hand.

He doesn't take it back.

The kitchen is very quiet. The fridge hums. Rain ticks against the black windows. Somewhere far below us, the city keeps going, like nothing at all happened tonight.

“There's a photograph,” I say, because if I don't say something, I'm going to do something. “On your bookshelf. I saw it on the way in.”

He knows which one. There's only one. Five children on a beach somewhere, squinting into the sun. The tallest boy has his arm hooked around the neck of a smaller one, who's laughing. A girl with dark braids is pulling a face in front of a taller girl who looks pensive rather than happy. A toddler sits in the sand, wailing.

“Sergei,” he says. “Me. Matilda and Katya. Timur's the one crying; he didn’t like sand.”

“It's the only photograph you've got out.”

“It's the only one I have of the five of us from before.”

Before Sergei died. Before his father lost his mind and his mother shut her door. Before Matilda and Katya married and moved away, and left him and Timur holding everything that was left.