Page 13 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
He looks at me for a moment in the way that means he has something to say and is deciding whether to say it. I wait. He decides against it and stands.
“Vasin will be handled by end of week,” he says.
“Good.”
He leaves, and I sit in the quiet of my office and look at nothing for a moment.
Grigori is tightening the frame around me, and he is doing it methodically, the way you tighten a frame when you are confident you have time on your side.
The Marchetti situation, the internal leak, the council session. None of it is a coincidence. It is pressure applied from multiple directions simultaneously by a man who has decided that the most efficient way to move me is to leave me nowhere else to go.
He is not wrong about the pressure.
He is wrong about what I will do under it.
Elena comes in at four fifteen with three documents requiring a signature. She crosses to my desk, sets the first document in front of me, and leans forward slightly to indicate the signature line, her finger moving to a clause midway down the page.
“This one needs your initials here as well,” she says. “The amended indemnity language from the Rezenkov revision.”
I lean forward to look at where she is pointing, and she shifts slightly to give me a better angle, and her blouse pulls loose at the waist, where it has come untucked from her skirt over the course of the day. A gap of an inch on her left side.
A small mark at the curve of her hip. Dark, comma-shaped, sitting exactly where the fabric has parted.
I look at it for less than two seconds before she straightens and smooths her blouse back into place as though she hasn’t noticed anything at all.
I look down at the document.
I sign it. I initial the clause she indicated. I pick up the second document and go through, and I don’t say a single word about what I just saw, and it is only when I hand the third signed document back, and she gathers them and turns for the door, that I notice my pen hand is not entirely steady.
I set the pen down.
I look at my hand for a moment, the way you look at something that has done something without your permission, and then I look at the closed door, and then I look at nothing.
A mark at the left hip. Small and dark and shaped like a comma.
I have seen that mark before.
I sit with that for a long moment and the thought doesn’t finish forming; it arrives at the edge and hovers there. I push back from my desk and go to the window and look at the city and tell myself I’m being irrational, that a birthmark is not evidence of anything, that I am a man who deals in facts and the facts I have are not enough to build anything on.
The facts I have are a laugh through a door, a mark on a hip, and a feeling I cannot name that has been sitting in the center of my chest since Monday morning.
It is not enough.
It is also not nothing.
The staff leaves in the usual order, the outer offices emptying by six thirty, and Elena is last as she always is.
She appears in my doorway at six fifty with her coat over her arm and her bag on her shoulder and tells me my seven a.m. is confirmed, and that she has left the Morozov notes on her desk if I need them before morning.
“Goodnight,” she says.
“Goodnight,” I say.
She goes. I listen to her heels in the corridor until the sound rounds the corner toward the elevators, and then there is nothing.
I pour two fingers of scotch and stand at the window and let myself think about it properly for the first time since Sunday.
Her voice. The way she spoke to me on that terrace. The laugh I heard through the door this morning, unguarded and warm and over before it properly started. The mark at her hip that I have been trying not to return to for the last three hours.
