Page 79 of Ruthless Sin
My eyes move to the girl beside her.
Younger. Smaller. Blonde hair down. Gray-green eyes that are Yelena’s eyes in a softer face, a face that hasn’t learned yet what the world is going to ask of it.
A mouth I had against mine tonight.
No.
I set the phone down and my palms go flat on the desk and then I pick it up again and set it down again.
No. It is not her. It cannot be her. This is a girl in a photograph from Saint Petersburg and the woman upstairs is a woman I pulled out of a Benedetti basement in New Orleans andthere are thousands of Russian women with gray-green eyes and this is not.
I pick up the phone.
The gray-green eyes look back at me.
She is dead. I decided she was dead.
I came home from Moscow and I sat in Dante’s office and I said the mission failed and I put her in the ground in my head. Because dead means the promise ended with Yelena. Because dead means I don’t have to carry three years of failing a fifteen-year-old girl who got sold while I was here. Easier. Cleaner.
I decided she was dead so I wouldn’t have to know she wasn’t.
The girl in the photograph has a mouth I just kissed.
She has been sleeping a few doors down from me for weeks.
She has been in my car every week.
She counted in Russian when she was afraid. I have refused to run this for weeks. I run it now. Every detail clicks. The eyes. The accent. The timeline. The age. The network. The conservatory training from the one city in Russia that takes it seriously, and it is the city this photograph was taken in.
There is no version of this where the girl in the photograph is not the woman upstairs.
Milochka.
She isMilochka.
I stopped looking for her three years ago. I told myself she was dead because it was easier than carrying a promise I couldn’t keep. And she walked into my basement. And I drove her to therapy every week. Tonight she put her mouth on mine and walked out of my library humming her dead sister’s song without knowing I was listening.
Yelena spent her last breath on her name.
I buried it.
She found me anyway.
I set the phone down on the desk face-down.
I put both hands flat on the wood and I stay there a long time, breathing.
Then I pick up the phone.
I look at the photograph one more time.
Yelena on the left. The girl beside her.
Mi dispiace. I'm sorry.
To both of them. I don’t know which one I mean more.
I have to be sure.
