Page 42 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
She leaves.
I stand in the silence of the penthouse, and I listen to the elevator doors open and close, and then there is nothing except the city outside the windows, indifferent and lit up, sixty-two floors below me, and not remotely interested in what just happened in this room.
I pick up my phone.
I call Kostya.
He answers on the second ring because Kostya always answers on the second ring, regardless of the hour.
“Clear my morning,” I say.
A pause. Just one. “Done,” he says, and hangs up.
I set the phone down.
I go back to the window, and I look at the city, and I start to build.
17
ELENA
The apartment isdark when I get home.
I knew it would be. I knew Mara was at Danny’s and I knew I was coming back to an empty apartment, and I was fine with that on the car ride home because I needed the quiet. I needed to not have to arrange my face for anyone or answer any questions or be anything other than a woman who just told her billionaire boss she is pregnant with his child and is now standing in her own kitchen at half past midnight in her coat trying to remember if she ate anything since lunch.
She did not eat anything since lunch.
I find crackers in the cupboard and eat them standing at the counter, and I look at the dark window over the sink, and think about Roman’s face when I said it. The way he went completely still. The way he saidsay that again, not because he did not hear me, but because his brain needed the seconds. The way he stood at the window with his back to me while he processed it, and I sat in the chair in my coat and waited, and the room was so quiet I could hear the city sixty-two floors below.
Come back tomorrow evening. I’ll have a proposal for you.
I put the crackers away, and I go to bed.
I wake up to the sound of the front door, Mara’s bag hitting the floor, and Mara’s voice saying, “Oh, good, you’re up,” in the tone of someone who has been composing questions on the subway ride home and is ready to ask all of them.
The clock on my phone says eight forty-two.
I sit up.
Mara appears in my doorway in yesterday’s clothes with her coat still on, hair down, and the cheerfulness of someone who had a genuinely good night and is trying to be considerate about it.
“You went,” she says.
“I went.”
She comes in and sits on the end of my bed, pulls her knees up, and looks at me with the full quality of her attention. “Tell me everything.”
I tell her about the car, the penthouse, and Roman opening the door himself. About how I stood in the entrance, still in my coat, and said it before I had fully decided I was ready.
His face when I did, that stillness, the way he saidsay that againnot because he didn’t hear me, but because he needed a second to catch up to what he had just heard.
What I said after. The seven weeks, the confirmation, you are the only man. The silence that came after all of that was long enough that I stopped trying to predict what it would produce.
Mara listens without interrupting, which is how I know she understands the weight of it.
“And then,” she says.
“And then he said come back tomorrow evening. That he would have a proposal for me.”
