Chapter 27
MOLLY
The burner phone is hot pink.
This was not my choice—I requested something unobtrusive, something that would sit in a drawer and not announce itself, and what arrived via Igor’s delivery system was a phone the color of a highlighter marker with a small sticker of a cat wearing sunglasses on the back, which I can only assume is Vet’s commentary on the situation.
The texts that come through it are sparse and characteristically her—short, precise, occasionally dry to the point of being arid, and always exactly what they need to be and nothing more.
Compound secure. He-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named’s Dog rehomed. His name was Pushkin. He is now living with a retired schoolteacher in Lausanne who sends photos.
The photos are excessive. I have saved all of them.
You are going to be enormous, she texted two weeks ago, after I sent her a photo of my current silhouette, which at seven months is considerable. This is good. The bigger you are, the harder it is to kidnap you.
That is the least comforting thing anyone has said to me about my pregnancy, I texted back.
You are welcome, she replied, and I laughed for longer than was strictly proportionate, because it was so completely Vet that it wrapped around the grief of her absence and made it temporarily smaller.
I’m thinking about this, sitting at the kitchen table in the Southampton mansion on a Tuesday morning in February with my coffee and my burner phone and my considerable silhouette, when the front door opens, and Carrie Ann Kohler comes through it.
She has a rolling suitcase, a tote bag whose handles appear to be losing structural integrity, and the expression of a woman who has traveled from Kansas to Southampton and is still processing the conceptual distance between the two.
When she sees me, she grins as I stand up at the table. “It’s a mansion.”
“I told you it was a mansion.”
“You said big house. You said he had a big house.”
“It’s a big house.” I shrug.
“Molly.” She sets the tote bag down and looks at the entryway—the stone floors and the old wood, a space that has been cared for over many decades—with the wide green eyes that are her default setting when encountering something that exceeds her expectation. “You’re gigantic.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“There was a man at the gate.”
“There are several men at the gate, generally.”
“He had—” She lowers her voice and makes a shape with her hand that is apparently meant to indicate a firearm.
“He better. It’s part of his job.”
She looks at me for a long moment across the kitchen.
Then she abandons the suitcase and the tote bag, crosses the kitchen, and hugs me with the full-body commitment she brings to all physical expressions of feeling, and I receive it with the equivalent commitment, minus the full-body part, because my body currently has a great deal of it accounted for.
She pulls back to look at my face, and then looks down, and then back up at my face. “You’re so pregnant.”
“I am very pregnant, yes. Twins, remember?”
“I know, but—” She gestures at the general situation. “You’re really pregnant.”
“Carrie Ann.”
“Right, sorry, I’ve seen pregnant people before, I just—it’s you.
” She steps back and looks around the kitchen, which is large and warm and equipped with the kind of appliances that make Carrie Ann, who approaches cooking with the reverence some people apply to religion, go slightly still with what I can only describe as yearning. “That’s a professional range.”
“It is.”
“Eight burners.”
“Plus a griddle.”
She looks at me with an expression that is doing several things simultaneously. “Okay. Walk me through all of it. From the beginning. The real beginning, not the wedding-day version where I was in shock about the bodyguard pointing a gun at my head.”
I pour her a coffee and spill the tea.
Carrie Ann listens to every detail like it’s the most fascinating thing ever.
I tell her about the affair and the proposal and the marriage and the babies.
When I get to the part about the car—the gun and the wrong turn and the door and what I did about it—she puts her coffee down very carefully. “You kicked a man out of a moving car?”
“He had a gun.”
“He had a—” She stops. “You’re so calm about this.”
“I’m not calm about it. I’ve had time to process it.”
“Molly, that’s—that’s a movie thing. That doesn’t happen to real people.”
“It happened to me.” I shrug. “It’s not out of the realm of life for the wife of a pakhan.”
Carrie Ann tilts her head. “Say that word again.”
“Pakhan.”
“What is that?”
“The head of a bratva. A Russian organized crime—”
“I know what the bratva is,” she says, with mild offense. “I watched a documentary.”
“Then you have more context than I had when I started. The documentary didn’t cover pakhans?”
“I don’t think so. It was a while ago… and I didn’t have context about the cars and the guns part.” She wraps both hands around her mug and looks at me with the direct sincerity that is one of the things I love most about her. “Are you safe? Like, really? I’m not going to get a call one day—”
“I don’t know. I’m safer than I was before the security situation got resolved.
I’m safer than a woman married to a pakhan probably should be, because Pavel treats my safety as a personal project of significant ongoing importance.
” I look at her steadily. “But I live in a world where things happen. Real things, not movie things. And I won’t let the fear of losing something stop me from trying to have it.
I’ve spent enough of my life not having things because I was afraid of what losing them would feel like. ”
Carrie Ann is quiet for a moment, absorbing this. “That’s the most Molly thing you’ve ever said.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s very good.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “I’m cautiously happy for you. With emphasis on the cautiously.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
She nods, satisfied, and reaches for a brownie from the plate I made this morning, because baking has become a stress response, and I have been significantly stressed in recent months, so we have not been short of brownies. “These are good.”
“I’ve had time to perfect the recipe.”
“You’ve been stress-baking again.”
“Extensively.”
“How stressed are we talking?”
“I made four batches last Tuesday. The security team was very happy about it.”
She grins, and it’s the grin I have known since we were eight years old, and it hasn’t changed at all, the wide, generous thing that takes over her whole face and makes everyone in its vicinity feel warm.
We’re in the middle of the third brownie—hers, I’m being more restrained because the twins are already running out of real estate, and I don’t need to assist them—when Igor comes through the kitchen on his way from somewhere to somewhere else.
He nods at me with the brief precision that is his version of good morning and registers Carrie Ann with the same complete, rapid assessment he applies to everything in his environment.
“Miss Kohler, welcome back.”
“Thank you,” Carrie Ann says, and her voice has developed a quality I haven’t heard in it before, which is a careful, deliberate evenness that a person produces when they are working to sound normal and are not entirely succeeding. “And, um, you can call me Carrie Ann.”
“Carrie Ann.” Igor nods, then moves through and out of the kitchen with the efficiency of a man who has places to be, and as his footsteps recede down the corridor, Carrie Ann continues looking at the doorway he exited through for approximately three seconds longer than is required to confirm his departure.
I pick up my coffee. I say nothing.
Carrie Ann becomes aware of the nothing I am saying and transfers her gaze from the doorway to my face with the slight over-correction of someone who has been caught doing something and is compensating with directness. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you don’t say anything and your face says everything.” She points at my face. “That thing.”
“I’m just drinking my coffee,” I say.
“Molly.”
“He’s my husband’s sovetnik. Eleven years of service. Very reliable. Excellent judgment. Handsome.”
“That’s not—I wasn’t—”
I add, “He’s not married.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m just mentioning it. In case it ever becomes relevant.”
Carrie Ann puts her brownie down with the precision of a woman assembling her dignity. “I came here to visit my best friend, not to be interrogated about—”
“Igor.” I say the name the way you say a word you are simply identifying, neutrally and without intention.
She looks at me. Her face is doing something that is not a blush but is the close neighbor of one, which, on Carrie Ann with her light complexion, is not subtle. “He’s very—he has a very—” She gestures vaguely. “Presence.”
“He does.”
“That’s all.”
“That’s all you needed to say.” I pick up my coffee with the serene composure of a woman who has won this exchange and is gracious about it. “Tell me about Kansas. I feel like we didn’t really get to talk at the wedding, what with the gun and the ceremony and everything.”
She accepts the subject change with the relief of someone who has been handed an exit and is taking it, and she leans back in her chair and wraps her hands around her mug.
“I finished my degree. Finally, officially, after the extra year and the independent study and the thesis that nearly killed me.”
“Carrie Ann, that’s huge. Why didn’t you—”
“I was going to call, and then everything with you happened, and I didn’t want to make it about me—”
“It should absolutely be about you, that is a massive deal—”
“It’s a massive deal that I have a drama degree in Manhattan, Kansas,” she says, with a dry quality that she deploys when she’s making a joke out of something that is also genuinely a problem.
“Where the primary theatrical venue is the high school gymnasium and the most dramatic thing that happens is the Hendersons’ dispute about the property line. ”
“What’s happening with the Hendersons’ property line?”
“Oh, it’s a whole thing. Not the point.” She tilts her head. “The point is I have this degree and I’m not sure what to do with it. There’s not much call for it where I am, which I knew going in, but knowing it going in and living it going in are different experiences.”
“Have you thought about—” I stop, because the thought that has arrived is large and somewhat irregular, and I want to look at it for a moment before I send it out into the world.
“About what?”
There’s more to it than I’m about to make it sound. “Have you thought about New York?”
Carrie Ann looks at me, laughs. But then she sees I’m not joking. “No. I don’t… I can’t afford New York, Molly.”
“No. But you could afford here for a while. Until you get your feet under you.”
“You’re not joking, are you?”
“Not joking.”
Then she looks around the kitchen—the professional range and the six burners and the stone floors and the light coming through the windows that look out onto the Southampton grounds—and then back at me.
“This isn’t New York,” she says.
“It’s adjacent to New York.”
“Molly, there’s a man at the gate with a gun.”
“There are several men at the gate,” I confirm. “And you already knew about them. You went past them to get here. You adjusted. Which means you can in the future too.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “I’d need to think about it,” she says finally.
“Of course.”
Igor passes through again, pausing briefly at the counter to collect something he left there earlier, and he says nothing further to either of us. Carrie Ann can’t take her eyes off of him, and I catch the subtle glance over his shoulder at her as he leaves the room.
Oh, it’s on. Good. They both deserve some happiness.
The burner phone buzzes on the table. I glance at it. Pushkin has learned to sit. The schoolteacher is very proud. Three photos attached.
I turn the phone to show Carrie Ann, because Carrie Ann is the kind of person who should know about Pushkin, and because sharing things with Carrie Ann is one of the great and durable pleasures of my life.
Carrie Ann looks at the photos for a long moment. “He’s very fluffy.”
“He really is.”
We finish the brownies, and I hope beyond hope that she takes me up on my offer.