Page 48 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
But the way he says it makes something cold move through me that has nothing to do with fear exactly and everything to do with the understanding that this man means what he says in a way that most people do not, in a way that has consequences, and that the child I am carrying has just been placed under a protection I do not fully understand the scope of yet.
Pavel and Gregor do not react.
Kostya looks at the floor.
The officiant turns to me. “Do you have anything you wish to add?”
I look at Roman.
He looks back at me and waits.
I shake my head.
He stays completely still. Nothing moves in his face. He just holds my gaze, and the moment passes. The officiant continues, and the room settles back into the rhythm of the words.
When the rings come out they are plain gold bands, warm from wherever they have been kept. Roman slides mine onto my finger with the steady hands of a man who does not fumble things. When I slide his ring onto his finger, my hands are not quite steady but I do not drop it. It goes on and it sits there on his finger and I look at it for a second before I look back up at him.
The officiant says the final words.
Roman steps toward me.
I stand very still, and I don’t know what to do with my hands or my face or any part of myself.
Then his hand comes up and touches my jaw, just lightly, just the tips of his fingers, tilting my face up slightly. He leans in, and I catch his cologne, that clean, smoky scent I have been cataloging from a professional distance for two years, close enough now to pull apart each note of it.
He is close enough that I can see faint lines at the corners of his eyes and I think he is going to kiss me and I want him to kiss me with a want that is embarrassingly total, but his lips press against my cheek.
Warm. Deliberate. A half second longer than a polite gesture.
He pulls back.
I stand there.
He is already looking at Kostya.
I press my lips together and look at the window, and I feel the warmth where his mouth was, and I feel the absence of where it was not, and I tell myself it does not matter, and my body disagrees completely.
Kostya’s phone is out before we leave the reception room.
I watch him from across the hall, two sentences into his call, nodding once at whatever the person on the other end says, and then he puts the phone away and looks at me across the distance between us and gives me a single nod.
I step into the small sitting room off the main entrance, close the door, sit on the edge of the nearest chair, and pull out my phone.
My father answers on the third ring.
“Myshka.” Warm and slow, his afternoon voice. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Papa.” I press my free hand flat against my knee. “The bills. The medical bills. They’re handled. All of them. You don’t need to worry about them anymore.”
Silence.
“What do you mean byhandled?”
“I mean paid. Cleared. There’s nothing left owing.”
A longer silence. I can hear him breathing. I can picture him sitting forward in his chair, his hand tightening around the phone.
“How,” he says.
