Page 53 of Ruthless Sin
“You’re coming to my baby shower. Everyone here is coming. We’re doing it here. Cassia already said yes. I’m making cabbage rolls my grandmother made me promise to make for her great-grandson. You don’t get to say no. I know you don’t say. You don’t have to say. You have to show up. Yes? Yes.”
I don’t say yes.
She squeezes my elbow.
“Yes.”
She lets me go, walks toward the lobby, and calls back over her shoulder.
"Do svidaniya, milaya. Do svidaniya, Sofia."
Goodbye, darling. Goodbye, Sofia.
Sofia raises her free hand.
Oksana is gone.
The music room door is half-open.
Sofia stops at it, pulls a folded page from the front of her notebook, and holds it out.
I take it. Unfold it.
Three words in pencil, folded four times.
I got you.
She doesn’t wait. She walks past me into the music room.
I follow.
The violin is on the stand against the far wall.
The wood is warm where the morning light has been sitting on it. I pick it up and the chin rest finds the small place under my jaw before I’ve asked it to. My left thumb settles into the neck.
The bow is in the stand below. I take it.
I play one bar.
The first bar ofTonkaya Ryabina.
The bow is rough on the strings. The rosin is dry. The strings are slightly out of tune.
The bar is not clean.
Sofia, behind me at the doorway, hums the bar back. Perfect. First try.
I lower the violin and put it back on the stand.
Cassia is in the hallway by the front office, folder under one arm, phone to her ear, voice clipped.
“No, the badges were the wrong vendor. I want the new ones by Thursday. Tell Marco. Tell him I said Thursday, not Friday. We are not running this clinic on a vendor who can’t make Thursday.”
She shifts the folder under her arm.
“Yes. I know what he’ll say. Tell him I said it anyway.”
She hangs up, looks at Sofia, looks at me, adjusts the folder.
