Page 36 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“I’ll talk to him next time.”
She folds the dish towel. “The bills from last week’s appointment came today. The insurance covered less than they estimated.” She names a number, and I feel it the way I always feel the numbers she gives me, in the back of my throat, a tightening that does not go away when I swallow. “I’ve been doing the math, Elena. Between what I bring in and what you send every month, we are managing. But managing is not the same as fine, and your father’s situation is not improving, and managing is not going to be enough for very much longer.”
I look at her. “I hear you.”
“Aleksei—”
“Carla.”
“He called again yesterday. He’s not going to keep calling forever, and when he stops calling, that door closes, and it does not open again.” She looks at me with the flat practicality that has always been the most exhausting thing about her, the way she strips everything down to numbers and outcomes, removing every other consideration as if it were never there. “I am not asking you to be happy about it. I am asking you to be realistic.”
I button my coat.
“Goodnight, Carla,” I say.
I walk down the front steps and to my car, and I sit in the driver’s seat, and I don’t start the engine for a long time.
The street is quiet. A dog barks somewhere a few houses down and then stops. A car passes with its radio on, something with a heavy bass that fades as it rounds the corner.
My father’s front window throws a rectangle of yellow light onto the small patch of front yard, and inside that light, I can see the edge of his chair and the side of his lamp and nothing else.
I start the car.
The apartment is quiet when I get back. Mara has left a plate of food on the counter with a note that sayseat thisand gone to bed, which is Mara’s version ofI love youand alsoI know you won’t eat if I’m not here to watch you.
I eat the food standing at the counter, and I look at the kitchen wall, and I run the numbers the way I have been running them for weeks, moving the pieces around, looking for the configuration that produces a different answer.
My salary covers my rent, my share of the bills, and the amount I send to Queens every month, and not much else.
My father’s medical bills are already beyond what that covers, and they are going to keep coming, and Carla is not wrong about the math, even if I will never say that out loud to her face.
Aleksei is a door I will not walk through. That is not a position I am willing to negotiate on, regardless of the numbers. I know what that house would feel like from the inside. I spent eight months finding out, and I am not going back.
Which leaves me with a pregnancy I haven’t told the father about, a resignation he refused without asking why, and a conversation I have been putting off for days that is going to change everything the moment I have it.
I put the plate in the sink.
I go to my room, and I sit on the edge of my bed, and I look at my hands in my lap, and I think about my father’s hands sitting still in his chair and my mother’s hands hovering an inch from my elbows all those years ago, ready to catch, and I think about what Mara said.
Ready is a luxury you don’t have.
I lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling, and the apartment is quiet around me, and outside the window, the city carries on as it always does, not particularly interested in any of the things I am lying here trying to solve.
I close my eyes.
I have to tell him. Soon.
14
ROMAN
The fileon Stone Renko is forty-three pages long, and I have read it twice.
I’m reading it a third time, not because I missed anything, but because I am a man who does not move on incomplete certainty, and I want to be certain.
Every financial transfer, every communication log, every movement pattern Kostya’s team has mapped over the last four months is in this file, and what it describes, laid out in the flat language of surveillance and forensic accounting, is a betrayal that has been running quietly inside my organization since before Grigori Volkov sat across from me at a lunch table and talked about his niece’s ambitions.
Four months.
