Page 59 of Babies for the Boss
Igor hands me a box of tissues from the bedside table with the quiet practicality of a man who anticipated this need and ensured it was met before it arose.
I’m still crying when the door opens, and Pavel comes in.
I know it’s him before I look up, the way I have always known—the atmospheric change of a space when he enters it. But when I look up, what I see is not the man I have been learning for years.
This is someone I have not met before.
He is beyond rage. That’s the only way to describe it—rage would be something recognizable, something with heat and motion, something that resembles a human emotion in its ordinary register. What is in his face is past that.
He crosses to the bed, and he takes my face in both hands, and he looks at me for a long moment with those pale blue eyes that are not cold toward me, that are never cold toward me, and something passes through them that is the underside of everything he’s showing the room—something raw and enormous and barely contained.
“You’re awake,” he says, very quietly.
“I’m awake.” My voice is wrecked from crying and from everything else. “Pavel?—”
“I’m going to destroy him.” He says it with the quiet of something that has been decided so thoroughly that saying it aloud is simply acknowledgment rather than declaration. Igor shoos the doctor out of the door before Pavel speaks again. “Fedor and everyone associated with him. Everyone who knew, everyone who participated, everyone who could have prevented it and did not. I will not stop until there is nothing left of any of them that could reach you.”
“Pavel—”
“I will not stop.” His hands are still gentle on my face, which is the contradiction of him that I have never fully resolved and amparticularly unable to resolve right now. “I will not stop until you are safe. Permanently. Without qualification.”
Is this where it happens? When it happens? Is this the time he becomes the thing that everyone who knows his name believes he already is? The monster that Vet described in careful euphemisms over sandwiches, the thing that lives on the other side of the line he draws so carefully between what he is and what he does?
And if it is—if loving him leads here, to a hospital room and a dead friend and a husband with the face of a man who has decided that the world requires burning—does that destroy us both? Does it destroy our marriage?
It’s too much. Too much for me to handle right now. Too much for me to process. I can’t manage him while I’m grieving her.
“I know you knew her longer. I know she worked for you for years before she ever came to my desk. But, Pavel, she was my friend. She was—” My voice catches, and I let it, and then I continue. “She was the person who sat next to me in the exam room when the doctor told me I was having twins, and she made my coffee exactly right every single morning, and she told me the truth when no one else did, and I just woke up from being knocked out to find out she’s gone. So, I need you to do something for me right now.”
He’s watching me with that raw, enormous attention.
“I need you to get your shit together and be here for me.”
He’s suddenly very still, looking at me, and I hold his gaze because looking away is not available to me right now. I need him to understand what I need from him this very moment.
“My love, the only thing that keeps you safe is the total annihilation of everyone who intends you harm. That is not rhetoric. That is the mechanics of the world we are in.”
“I know that world. I’ve been in it long enough?—”
“Then you know I cannot sit beside you and hold your hand while Fedor draws breath.” He leans forward and presses his lips to my forehead, and they stay there for a moment longer than I want them to. “I love you more than anything I have ever loved in my life. More than I knew it was possible to love something. And that is precisely why I cannot stay.”
Then he straightens, and he looks at me for one more moment with those pale eyes, and he leaves.
I have lost two anchors in ten minutes. First Vet, now Pavel. I sit with that in a room which is quiet except for the hums and beeps of the equipment and the distant institutional sounds of the hospital conducting its ordinary business, as if this is just another day.
Igor is still there.
I had almost forgotten that he didn’t leave when Pavel arrived, that he was still in the chair beside the bed, his hands folded, his face bearing its careful composure, his eyes on my face with the steady attention of a man who has decided his job is not finished.
“He’s going to do it.” It’s not a question.
“He’s going to try,” Igor says, which is the most honest version of yes available.
“Can you stop him from getting himself killed?”
He’s quiet for a moment, and in the quiet I see him making a choice—the choice between the diplomatic version and the true one. “I will try. I will not promise to succeed, because I try not to lie to you.” A pause. “He’s not entirely wrong about the mechanics. The threat must be addressed. But the scale he’s contemplating?—”
“Will get him killed.”
