Page 30 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
Roman Petrov lands on Monday morning.
I pick up my phone, and I call Mara.
She picks up on the second ring. “Hey, did you want me to?—”
“I need you to come.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I’m at the coffee shop on 54th. Can you come now?”
A beat. Just one. “I’m already getting my coat,” she says.
We sit on a bench in the park two blocks away because I need air and Mara needs to see my face, and the bench gives us both.
She hasn’t said anything since I told her, which is the most useful thing she has ever done for me. She’s just sitting besideme with her shoulder pressed against mine and her coffee going cold in her hands.
“Okay,” she says finally. Quietly. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking that I cannot have this baby and keep this job.”
“Those are not necessarily the only two options.”
“They are for me.” I look at the park. A woman is walking a dog in the middle distance, the dog stopping every few feet to investigate something important. “He’s my employer, Mara. He is twenty-eight years older than me. He runs an organization that I understand just enough about to know that this is not a situation that ends cleanly for anyone.”
“Does he know? About the masquerade.”
I close my eyes briefly. “Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since before he left.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “And you were going to tell me this when?”
“I’m telling you now.”
She shifts on the bench to look at me properly. “Elena.”
“I know.”
“What are you going to do?”
I look at the woman with the dog. She has given up trying to move it along and is just standing there waiting, patient and unhurried, while the dog takes its time with whatever it has found.
“I’m going to go home,” I say. “And I’m going to write my resignation letter. And on Monday, when he lands, I am going to put it on his desk before he has a chance to finish whatever conversation he thinks we are going to have.”
Mara looks at me for a long moment. “And the baby?”
“One thing at a time.”
She doesn’t push. She puts her arm through mine, and we sit on the bench until the cold makes it unreasonable, and then we walk home, and she makes tea, and she doesn’t ask me anything else.
The resignation letter takes me four drafts.
The first one is too apologetic. The second one explains too much. The third one is one sentence and says nothing.
The fourth one is two paragraphs, professional and clean, with no reason given beyond personal circumstances.
I read it twice, save it, and close my laptop.
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