Page 96 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
She looks at it. She looks at me. She puts her mug down, opens the box slowly, and looks at the bracelet inside, and she doesn’t speak for a long moment.
“The stones,” she says finally.
“Ruby,” I say. “July.”
She picks it up. She holds it in her palm and turns it slightly in the kitchen light, and something moves across her face that she does not manage, does not try to manage, a woman receiving something that landed in a way she didn’t expect. Her eyes go bright. She blinks once.
She turns to me and reaches up and puts her hand against my jaw, and I turn my head and press my mouth to her palm, and I hold it there.
She laughs.
Not the version she used in my office for two years, clipped and professional and deployed at appropriate intervals. The real one, unguarded, the one I heard through a door months ago that stopped my pen mid-sentence and has been stopping things in me ever since. She’s laughing in my kitchen in her robe with the bracelet in her hand and her bump round under the fabric, and Ipull her against my side, and she leans into me, and I think about the man I was at the beginning of all of this.
Running a masquerade for three hundred people.
Not recognizing the woman who managed every detail of it, standing ten feet away from me in a green dress.
I look at the city through the window.
I hold my wife against my side.
43
ELENA
Five Months Later
Mara has beenon my kitchen counter for forty minutes talking about Danny’s mother and I have stopped pretending to do anything else because this conversation requires my full attention. Also I can’t bend down to pick things up anymore so I’m standing at the counter with my hands wrapped around a glass of water and my stomach resting against the edge of it like a shelf.
“She asked me if I was serious about him,” Mara says, pulling another cracker from the box. “Those exact words. Are you serious about my son? Like I’ve been passing him notes in class.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I loved him.” She eats the cracker. “She cried. Danny cried. I nearly cried. It was a whole ambush.”
“Mara.”
“I know. It was beautiful. I just prefer to be emotionally prepared before I walk into things.” She looks at my stomach. “How are they today?”
“Nikolai has been kicking my ribs since six this morning,” I say. “Mikhail is kicking too, somewhere I can’t identify, and that is somehow worse.”
She looks at my face. “You look tired.”
“I’m growing two people. I’m allowed to be tired.”
“You look more tired than yesterday tired.” She tilts her head. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, Mara. Tell me the rest of Danny’s mother’s story.”
She opens her mouth.
I feel it.
Not a kick. Not the familiar pressure of two small bodies rearranging themselves. A tightening, low, spreading across my entire abdomen in a wave that stops my breath and makes my hand go flat against the counter.
“Elena.” Mara is off the counter.
“I’m okay,” I say, and then the second one comes, harder, and I’m not okay, and I look at Mara, and she looks at me, and her face has gone completely white.
