Page 41 of Nikolay

I had come here prepared to speak to my father.

I was not prepared for her hands.

She took my forearm in both of hers the moment she reached me, her grip warm and surprisingly firm, and turned me toward the seating area near the darkened window as if she had every right in the world to direct me. Under other circumstances, I might have smiled at the audacity. Tonight I let her steer me because resisting would have required an energy I no longer possessed.

“You will sit,” she said. Then, glancing over her shoulder toward my father with all the authority of someone who had forgotten she had not been born to this household, “Call for him a drink.”

Her voice carried that curious blend she always had—a formal cadence and human softness, as though an ancient text had learned compassion and refused to choose between them.

“I am not certain alcohol improves this,” I said.

“You are not being consulted,” she replied.

Had I been less frayed, I might even have laughed.

She settled me on the sofa by the window. The leather gave under my weight with a muted sigh. Outside the glass, the city spread in a distance of light and darkness I scarcely registered. My attention had narrowed too far inward for skylines.

Father crossed from the desk and drew Devon’s chair close to his own, placing it beside his. He waited until she sat, then let one hand rest briefly along her upper arm before taking his own seat.

Then he looked at me.

That was all.

No question. No command. No impatience. Only those pale, unnervingly steady eyes fixed on mine with the full weight of nine centuries behind them and none of it crowding the room. The silence he offered was not empty. It was precise. It made evasion feel childish before it began.

Somewhere to my left, a discreet chime answered whatever internal summons had been made for the drink. I heard a door beyond the office proper open and close. Heard glass set on wood. None of it mattered.

I exhaled once through my nose and stared at the carpet between us.

“I made a fool of myself,” I said.

My father did not answer.

I laughed without humor. “That is too elegant a phrasing. I have made several fools of myself in quick succession, and I am only now discovering the extent of my talent.”

Still, he said nothing.

The drink had been left on the low table near my knee. Bourbon, by the scent. Good. Expensive. Irrelevant.

“I went into her room,” I said.

Devon shifted slightly. Not in alarm, but in closer attention.

“I had no business there. No invitation. I knocked, she told me to come in believing I was Lucia, and I entered. She was on the floor among boxes of books from Texas.” I swallowed once. My mouth had gone dry despite the untouched glass inches from my hand. “Books everywhere. Classics. Early editions. Paperbacks half destroyed by rereading. Notes in the margins. Her entire mind laid open in the room and I walked into it armed with my assumptions.”

The memory rose with intolerable clarity. Her hair piled loosely. The cropped shirt. The absurd bright declarations across the fabric. My own contempt arriving before my understanding.

“I saw romances first,” I said. “The sort meant to scandalize men who deserve scandal. I behaved as though that proved something about her. As though a woman who read filth for pleasure and worked with her hands could not also possess a private life of the mind substantial enough to shame me.”

Devon’s mouth moved slightly, not quite a frown. My father remained stone-still.

“She had Steinbeck, Ellison, Austen, Faulkner, Dickinson. Shelves arranged not for display but for use. There were annotations, arguments with the text, layers of thought. I did not know.” The words grew rougher. “I had never bothered to know.”

I reached for the bourbon then and did not drink. I only wrapped my hand around the glass because the weight gave my fingers something to do besides curl into useless fists.

“She stopped me from touching a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.” A humorless breath escaped me. “Slapped my hand away like I was a child reaching for a relic, and perhaps I was. Then she told me I had not earned the right to touch it. That I was not worthy because I could not understand a novel about being judged by character rather than circumstance because I had spent weeks doing precisely the opposite to her.”

Devon’s fingers came down lightly on my sleeve then, just above the wrist. Not to hush me. Only contact. Human in its instinct, celestial in its unselfconsciousness.