Chapter 10 #3
The floor is cold, polished marble, beautiful, but no rug, no soft surface for a six-year-old to sit on while she draws, which might explain why she draws behind curtains and in every room of this house except the one that’s supposed to be hers.
It’s clean and expensive, but also completely devoid of personality. No drawings on the walls. No color anywhere, not a single splash of the vivid, detailed, extraordinary world that lives inside Anya’s sketchbook.
I know this isn’t my place to fix. I’m a tutor, not a decorator, not a parent, not a permanent fixture. But the whiteness of this room, the emptiness of it, makes me want to go buy a gallon of paint and let Anya choose the color.
She’s still asleep .
I sit up slowly, and my back protests with a symphony of cracks.
Picking up the empty mug from the nightstand, I glance down only to catch sight of my pajamas.
I blush, remembering the embarrassment of last night.
I glance outside the door and to the hallway beyond. The theoretical possibility of encountering other humans or, God forbid, one specific human with blue eyes and a jawline and a habit of appearing in kitchens without warning has my nerves misfiring.
But it’s empty.
I make it to my room in four seconds flat, which might be a personal record.
I close the door, lean against it, and make a solemn vow to the ceiling and to whatever deity watches over mortals who humiliate themselves in front of beautiful men, I will never wear these pajamas again.
I will burn them. I will salt the earth where they fall.
I reach for my phone to check for messages like I do every morning, but the only notification on the screen is a deposit confirmation. My weekly payment, on schedule.
I let out a slow breath of relief, using this as a reminder of why I’m here. Of what brought me to this house, to this contract.
I open the banking app, enter the amount, adjusted for this month’s increased rate, and send the transfer to Landon.
I shower and dress quickly, pulling my hair back into a ponytail. Dark jeans, a cream-colored sweater, and the flats with the scuffed toes.
The rest of the day is math.
Or, rather, the rest of the day is supposed to be math. According to the curriculum I’ve designed, a structured but flexible program that covers reading, writing, math, science, and art across the week, Saturday mornings are for number work. Patterns, counting, and basic addition .
The problem? Anya hates math.
She doesn’t even have to say it. Her shoulders climb toward her ears, her pencil grip tightens, and Mr. Whiskers gets pulled closer than normal. She stares at the numbers as if they’ve personally offended her.
“Okay,” I say, five minutes in, watching her draw the same digit over and over without progressing. “New plan.”
She frowns.
“How many feathers does a sparrow have?”
She blinks. “What?”
“A sparrow. The one in your drawing. How many feathers do you think it has?”
“I — I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out.” I pull out a piece of paper and draw a terrible bird. It’s lumpy and lopsided, with legs that resemble a twig stuck in a potato more than a bird. The corner of Anya’s mouth moves.
“This is Bernard,” I say. “Bernard needs feathers. Let’s say he needs ten feathers on each wing. How many feathers is that in total?”
She shifts her gaze between Bernard and me. The gears behind her eyes turn as she brings the pencil to her lips.
“Twenty,” she says.
“Twenty. Perfect. Now, Bernard also needs five feathers on his tail. So, twenty plus five is…”
“Twenty-five.”
“You’re a genius.”
“I’m not a genius.”
“You’re a math genius who doesn’t know she’s a math genius yet. That’s the best kind.”
We spend the next hour building Bernard’s anatomy through arithmetic: feathers on wings (multiplication introduction), length of flight paths (addition), and the number of worms eaten per day versus number of worms Bernard wants to eat (subtraction, and also a surprisingly engaging narrative about a very ambitious bird).
Anya redraws Bernard at the end. Her version is infinitely better than mine: a small, plump sparrow with personality in its eyes and twenty-five precisely rendered feathers.
The afternoon is devoted to science. We go into the garden, which is mostly dormant but still holds enough dead leaves, cold soil, and winter-bare branches to fill an hour of observation and questions.
She touches everything, from picking up a leaf and studying its veins to finding a beetle and watching it with the focus of a surgeon.
By the time we come back inside, her cheeks are pink from the cold, and she’s holding four items she’s collected: the leaf, a small stone, a twig with a Y shape, and a berry she found on a bush that I had to quickly identify as non-poisonous before she put it in her mouth.
It’s a good day. A full, real, messy, productive day, and when I finally sit down in my room after dinner, I have a sense of satisfaction.
Rolan was nowhere to be seen.
All day, not a glimpse, not a footstep. The house is large enough that two people can exist in it without ever crossing paths, and today, that’s apparently what happened.
Mr. Belov is either traveling again, locked in his office, or simply occupying a different dimension of this enormous, silent estate.
Which is fine with me.
Because every time my mind has wandered today — and it has wandered more often than I’d like to admit — it’s gone back to the same place.
I need to stop. He’s my employer. He’s the father of my student. He’s a man I’ve spoken close to fourteen words to, and twelve of them were variations on “yes” and “thank you.”
I do not need to think about him.