Chapter 9 #2
She looked at the papers on the desk. The phone. The invoice with her blue-pen annotations. The list of remaining calls in her handwriting, six names not yet crossed off.
“I don’t know.”
“Kostya can handle the rest,” I suggested.
“But—”
“No buts, young lady.”
She locked eyes with me, and for a moment I thought she might argue.
But she didn’t. Instead, we went to find Kostya near the operations room door.
He was lookign tired, harrowed. He had done since the murder.
Still, when Ksenia handed him the paperwork with brief, clear instructions, he took it without question, then kissed her cheek.
We found Ilya outside. “The Glasshouse. Van Brunt Street.”
Ilya nodded and opened the car.
The Glasshouse occupied a corner lot in Red Hook, a converted warehouse with tall industrial windows and a hand-painted sign above the door.
Inside, the front room was bright and crowded—wooden tables, hanging plants, the smell of coffee and baked fruit.
We passed through to the rear room, where the noise dropped and the light softened.
Four tables. Two occupied. A low brick wall with climbing ivy that had been trained across the back window.
We sat at the table farthest from the door. A server brought menus. Ksenia ordered apple cake and tea. I ordered coffee.
The cake arrived warm, dusted with cinnamon, a slice thick enough to require a fork. Ksenia ate slowly. The tension in her shoulders loosened with each bite. She held the tea in both hands and looked at the ivy on the back window and let the quiet settle around her.
I watched her.
“You’ve been doing that all morning,” she said.
She did not look up from her tea. Her voice carried the particular mildness she used when she was telling me something I should already know.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me. When you think I’m not paying attention.”
I considered denying it.
“Yes,” I said. “I have.”
She looked at me. Her hazel-green eyes held mine across the small table. The rear room was warm and close and smelled of apple and cinnamon and the particular green scent of the ivy behind her.
“What have you been thinking about?”
“Lots of things. What we’ve been through. The fact we’re married. But more than that . . . I was thinking of our kiss. This morning.”
She set down the tea. Her mouth curved into a smile. Unguarded. An expression of pure delight.
“You’ve been distracted by an interrupted kiss.”
“I have.”
She moved her chair. The scrape of wood on the concrete floor was the only sound in the room. She shifted six inches closer, until her knee pressed against mine beneath the table. The contact was deliberate. She left her leg where it was.
I looked at the windows behind her. Tall, industrial, original to the building. The glass was slightly uneven, the panes hand-set, the putty cracked and repaired in places. Someone had painted the frames a soft grey that respected the original iron.
“The windows are original,” I said.
Ksenia looked. Her eyes changed—the professional assessment arriving instantly, the architect’s gaze sweeping the frames, the sash, the muntin pattern.
“Steel sash. Pre-war. Those are twelve-over-twelve lights — that’s unusual for this scale.
Someone cared about the proportions.” She leaned to see better.
“The putty is failing on the third pane from the left. And that’s a replacement muntin — the profile is wrong.
Too thick. Whoever did it used stock rather than custom milling. ”
“Is this your idea of flirting, husband?”
I laughed.
“You mean you don’t find my window chat sexy?”
“It’s a shame we only have an hour of this,” she said, still smiling. “I wonder what I could learn about—I don’t know—the building’s damp proof course?”
I laughed harder.
“Look, I’m a gangster, OK, I live a dangerous life! I’m exciting.”
She joined in with the laughter.
“You’re about as exciting as grout.”
I love you.
I almost said it.
The words were right there.
She looked at me, and there was a feeling, a sense that she knew, that she understood I’d held something back. She bit her lip and her lips widened a touch. For some reason, breathing became harder, heavy, portentious.
The curve of her mouth softened. Her hand, which had been resting on the table beside her plate, moved. Her fingers found the edge of my sleeve and held.
She looked at the remaining cake on her plate. She looked at the ivy on the window. She looked at my hand on the table.
“One hour isn’t enough.”
“No.”
She picked up her fork and ate the rest of the cake. Her knee stayed against mine. I drank my coffee. The rear room held us in its warm, green quiet, and for thirty-seven minutes I did not think about security codes or assassination timelines or the six names on Nikita’s list.
I thought about her knee against mine.
Back at Dover street, I gave Nikita responsiblity for the routine calls at two-fifteen.
“The dispatch revisions, the Kozlov confirmation, the union follow-ups. All yours until tomorrow morning.”
Nikita looked up from his tablet. His green eyes narrowed. “You’re giving me union follow-ups.”
“I’m giving you everything that isn’t urgent.”
“You’re giving me all the boring shit to do.”
“That’s what little brothers are for.”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“And yet, still my little brother.”
He took the list without further protest. I left him at the dining table with his tablet and his coffee and the expression of a man who suspected he was being managed but could not prove it.
I went to the kitchen.
Galina had left the space clean. The counters were wiped. The stove was cold. I opened the refrigerator and inventoried what was available—tomatoes, onions, garlic, butter, bread, three kinds of cheese, stock in a sealed container. Enough for soup and grilled cheese. Enough for what I had in mind.
Ksenia was still stressed. The break had helped but I had a feeling she needed more.
I set the tomatoes on the counter. I found the cutting board. I began quartering them, and the kitchen filled with the sharp green scent of fresh stems and the acid tang of cut flesh.
I heard her before I saw her. The soft sound of slippers on the hallway floor—the ridiculous purple ones, fleece-lined, too large. Then her footsteps slowed. She stopped at the kitchen doorway.
I looked up.
The animation from the café was gone. The woman who had pressed her knee against mine and smiled over apple cake and said one hour isn’t enough had retreated somewhere behind her eyes.
What stood in the doorway was quieter. Smaller.
Her coat was still on. Her bag hung from one shoulder. She held the strap with both hands.
She looked at me. I set down the knife.
“Daddy?”
She needed me. Somehow I’d known it. I put my phone on the counter, screen down. I gave her my full attention.
“Yes, Ksyusha?”
She stood in the doorway with her coat still on and her hands still on the strap and said, “Will you take care of me tonight?”
The sentence was simple. She delivered the words in a voice without polish, without effort. A voice that was just her.
“Of course I will, Baby Girl.” It was pure pleasure to see the smile break over her face. “Now, go change into something comfortable,” I said. “Take your time. I’ll make dinner.”
She did not argue. She did not negotiate. She turned and walked down the hallway, and I heard the slippers shuffle and the door to her suite open and close.
I made the soup. Slid the quartered tomatoes into a pot with olive oil and garlic.
Sliced an onion. Added stock. Let it simmer.
The kitchen warmed. Steam rose and fogged the window above the sink.
I sliced bread—thick, even pieces. Buttered both sides.
Layered cheese—Gruyère and a sharp white cheddar—and set the first sandwich in the pan.
The butter hissed. The bread turned gold.
I was cutting the second sandwich in half when she came back.
Lavender pajamas. Pink and cream striped socks.
Misha the rabbit tucked beneath her right arm, the threadbare ear visible against her elbow.
Her hair was loose. Her face was bare. She stood in the doorway and looked at me and at the table and at the food and something in her shoulders released—a small, visible settling, the way a held breath lets go.
“Sit, Little One,” I said.
She sat. I placed the bowl of soup in front of her. The grilled cheese on a plate beside it. I poured water into a glass and set it within reach. Then I sat in the chair beside her—not across, beside—and waited.
She ate.
She did not check her phone. She did not look at the clock. She held Misha in her lap beneath the table and ate what I had made for her.
When the bowl was empty, she set down the spoon. She looked at the plate. One piece of crust remained. She picked it up, dipped it in the last of the soup, and ate it.
Then she looked at me.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For needing this. After this afternoon. You took me out. You gave me an hour. And I come home and I can’t — I can’t stay adult. I can’t hold it together for one full day.”
I looked at her. At the lavender pajamas and the striped socks and the rabbit in her lap and the woman inside all of it who was apologizing for needing care from the man who had agreed to give it.
“Ksyusha.”
She stopped.
“This is a hard time. A time of change and adjustment. A time, in fact, of trauma.”
Her fingers tightened on Misha’s ear.
“Both of us are suffering right now. I know that this wedding is one of convenience. Of strategy. But I feel—and I think you do, too, that it is more than that. We need each other. I feel it. Do you?”
She nodded.
“Good. Now, you keep treating my company as something you’ve borrowed,” I said. “Something expensive that you have to return. Something you owe me for.”
“I don’t—”