Page 49 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I look at the ring on my finger. Plain gold, warm, sitting on my hand as if it has always been there.
“I got married today,” I say.
The silence that follows is the longest one yet. Long enough that I pull the phone from my ear to check that the call is still connected. It is. I put it back.
“Married,” he says. The word comes out like he is holding it at a distance, checking it from every angle. “To whom?”
“Someone good. Someone who is going to take care of things.” I pause. “I wanted you to know that you don’t have to worry anymore. That’s all.”
“Elena—”
Rustling. A different voice.
“Elena.” Carla, her words coming fast and pointed. “What’s going on? Your father is sitting here looking like—who did you marry, why didn’t you tell us, how did this happen, is this because of Aleksei, did you do this because of?—”
I take the phone from my ear.
I end the call.
I sit in the small, quiet room with my phone in my lap. Mara’s laugh carries from somewhere down the hall. The plain gold ring sits on my finger. His cologne is still faint in the air around me. I breathe in and out until my hands are steady.
Then I stand up and go back to my husband.
20
ROMAN
The gathering dispersesquietly and without ceremony, each person moving back into the machinery of their own day. Pavel and Gregor leave first, the way they always leave, without goodbyes, just a nod in my direction, and then they are gone. The officiant, in his gray suit and folded hands, is escorted to his car by one of the estate staff.
Kostya stays.
He’s standing in the entrance hall when I come out of the reception room, and he’s looking at his phone, an expression suggesting he has things to tell me and is calculating when to tell them. I give him a small shake of my head. Not yet. He puts the phone in his pocket.
Across the drive, Elena and Mara are standing beside the car Viktor has brought around for Mara, standing close in a way that makes it clear the rest of us are not part of it.
Mara is talking, her hands moving the way they always seem to move when she talks, and Elena is listening with her arms folded across her chest, not defensive, just holding herself. ThenMara says something, and Elena’s head drops forward, and her shoulders move, and she is laughing, quietly, her forehead almost touching Mara’s shoulder.
I stay where I am.
She’s still in the ivory dress. Her hair has come slightly loose from the arrangement it was in during the ceremony, one strand falling against the side of her neck, and she’s standing on the gravel drive of my estate in the gray afternoon and she looks nothing like my secretary and nothing like the woman I didn’t recognize at my own masquerade and entirely like someone I do not have a category for yet.
She looked beautiful today.
I didn’t tell her this, and I’m not going to tell her this tonight because I don’t know yet how to say things like that to this woman without them meaning more than I’m prepared to have them mean. But it’s true, and I am aware that it is true in the way you are aware of things you are not ready to do anything about.
Mara pulls Elena into a hug that Elena returns with both arms, her eyes closing briefly over Mara’s shoulder. They separate, Mara gets into the car, and the car moves down the drive.
Elena watches it go, standing at the edge of the gravel, until it turns through the gates and disappears.
Then she turns around. She finds me across the drive, and she looks at me, and she straightens slightly, her hands dropping to her sides, and she walks toward me across the gravel.
“Ready,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
The car takes us back to the city.
Elena sits beside me with her bag in her lap and her hands folded on top of it, and she looks out the window at the city arriving block by block, and I look at her profile against the glass, and I think about the ceremony.
