Page 53 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“What did you do?”
“I told him I was Roman’s wife and took the envelope.”
A pause. Then Mara makes a deep, satisfied sound. “Good. Did you say it as you meant it?”
“I said it like it was a fact.”
“That’s better than meaning it.” She pauses again. “Do you mean it?”
I look at the envelope on the table. The plain gold ring on my left hand. The city outside the window is doing its Saturday thing, indifferent and enormous, not remotely interested in what I mean or do not mean.
“I signed the papers,” I say.
“Elena.”
“I’m figuring it out, Mara.”
She lets that sit for a moment. Then she says, “Tell me about the sheets.”
And I laugh. Properly, the way I have not laughed in weeks.
I tell her about the sheets, the pillow, the mattress, and the coffee machine with its seventeen settings. She listens and adds commentary in exactly the right places, and for ten minutes, the penthouse feels less like a space that doesn’t know me yet and more like just a place I’m talking to my best friend from.
When we hang up, I’m still smiling.
Roman comes home at seven.
I hear the elevator before I hear him, the soft mechanism of it arriving at the floor, and then the door and his footsteps crossing the entrance, and then he appears in the doorway of the main room where I am sitting on the sofa with my laptop and the remains of the dinner the kitchen staff left for me on the coffee table.
He looks at the table. At me. At the laptop.
“The Harmon follow-up,” I say. “They want a call on Monday morning. I’ve put it in your calendar for nine.”
He takes his jacket off and drapes it over the arm of the nearest chair and comes to sit at the other end of the sofa and reaches for the folder I’ve left on the cushion between us, the day’s flagged correspondence. He opens it and begins reading and I go back to my laptop and we sit like that for an hour, the city outside the windows and the lamp on between us and the quiet of two people who have learned to work in the same space.
At some point, he sets the folder down and says, without looking up from whatever he has moved on to reading, “A man came by this morning.”
“Petyr,” I say. “He left an envelope. It’s on the table.”
Roman looks at me then. “What did he say to you?”
I meet his gaze. “Nothing worth repeating.”
He holds it for a moment. Something moves in his jaw, brief and controlled, and then he looks back at his reading and says nothing else, and I look back at my laptop, and we do not discuss it further.
We do not need to.
I’m in bed at eleven with the lamp on and a book I’ve been reading the same page of for twenty minutes when there’s a knock at the door.
Not tentative. Two knocks, even and unhurried, the way Roman does everything.
I close the book.
“Come in,” I say.
The door opens.
He’s in dark trousers and a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he stands in the doorway and looks at me in the bed with the lamp on. Neither of us says anything for a moment, and neither of us pretends that what is happening right now is about anything practical.
