Page 73 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
Viktor drives and the city does what it does, and I sit in the back, and I count the hours until Friday, and I think about two votes and one window and a man who has been patient for fourteen months and is running out of time.
So am I.
31
ELENA
The elevator iswhat wakes me.
I open my eyes and the ceiling of my bedroom is still dark and Roman is standing at the foot of the bed in his full suit, jacket on, phone already in his hand. I push myself up onto my elbows and squint at him and he says there is a mandatory council session this morning. He doesn’t know how long it will run.
“Okay,” I say.
He crosses the room and presses his mouth to my forehead and I close my eyes for the two seconds it lasts and then he is gone and the elevator hums and the penthouse goes quiet. I lie back down and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact that I still have not told him about Aleksei.
I need to tell him about Aleksei.
I get up.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter in my robe waiting for the kettle when the intercom buzzes and Irina’s voice comes through saying, “Miss Mara is here.”
I say, “Send her up,” and thirty seconds later Mara comes through the kitchen door with a paper bag from the bakery on 56th Street and her coat still on and her eyes bright in the way they get when she has been sitting on something since last night and has run out of patience for sitting on it.
“He said he loves me,” she says, dropping the bag on the counter.
I turn around. “Danny.”
“Danny.” She pulls her coat off and drapes it over the stool. “We were on his couch watching something genuinely terrible and he just said it. Like he was commenting on the traffic. I love you. Then kept watching the television.”
“What did you say.”
“Nothing. I sat there for approximately forty-five seconds and then I said I was hungry and went to the kitchen.”
“Mara.”
“I know.” She opens the bag and puts two pastries on the counter between us. “I panicked. You know I panic at that part.”
“You have to tell him.”
“I know I have to tell him.” She props her chin in her hand and looks at me across the counter. “Do you think he meant it?”
“He said it unprompted during bad television. He meant it.”
She looks at the pastry in front of her. Breaks a piece off. “I think I love him too.”
“I know you do. You’ve been describing his shower pressure to me for two months.”
She laughs and I laugh and she passes me a piece of pastry even though buttery smells in the mornings have been making me nauseous for weeks. This morning my stomach is calm, so I take it and eat it and she tells me everything—the exact words Danny used, the expression on his face, what he was wearing, the terrible television program. I lean against the counter and listen, and the morning feels easy in a way I did not expect it to feel.
“How are you feeling?” she says after a while.
“Better this week, actually. The nausea has backed off.” I wrap my hands around my chamomile. “I had a moment last night where I just lay there thinking about how fast everything has moved. How none of this is what I thought twenty-three would look like.”
“Is that bad?”
I think about Roman’s mouth on my forehead this morning. The coffee he left warm on the counter. His hands in the dark and the way he saidI am glad about the child, quiet and certain, like it cost him something to say it, and he paid it anyway.
“No,” I say. “It’s just fast.”
