Chapter 17 #2
“I had business here, and the car was already coming this way. Not everything is a conspiracy, Piper.” She says it lightly, and it would have worked on almost anyone, which is why it doesn’t work on me.
Vera is good, contained and impossible to rush, and that’s the problem.
A person with nothing to hide doesn’t manage the concealment that smoothly.
She hid the phone before she decided whether hiding it would look strange, which makes it a reflex, and a reflex means there’s something on it worth hiding.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve watched her do a version of this three times. She cut a call short when I walked into the study. She closed a folder before I reached the table. She started to say a name once and swallowed it.
Each one alone is nothing, and I know it.
I also know how to spot a mark, and Vera isn’t running a con on me, or if she is, I can’t find what she’s after, which unsettles me, because I can always find the angle.
With most people, the secret is about money, which I can follow.
Whatever Vera is protecting isn’t for sale, and that’s exactly what makes it hard to read.
“You’re right,” I say with a smile, giving her the out. “Not everything’s a conspiracy.”
She looks at me a beat too long, and I look back with the widow’s mild pleasantness.
Neither of us believes the other, but we let it go.
I store it away and decide to watch her longer, because instinct isn’t worth handing Nikita yet, and whatever else Vera is, she is standing very close to his family, and I have learned the hard way what it costs to trust the person standing closest before I can name what she wants.
He’s in the kitchen when I get back, and there are two plates.
That stops me in the doorway, because Nikita usually eats in his office, like a man for whom meals are refueling and nothing else.
Tonight, there’s a pan on the stove that actually smells like dinner, two plates on the counter where we drank coffee this morning, and him with his sleeves pushed up looking mildly defensive about it.
“Platon says I cook one meal well,” he says. “This is it. You shouldn’t build expectations.”
“I’m keeping them low.” I sit at the counter, and he sets a plate in front of me.
It’s pasta, and it’s good. I eat more than I have in a week, because the nausea finally backs off by evening.
I wonder if he noticed. He doesn’t say a word about it, but cooking when I’m most likely to be able to eat suggests he did.
We eat, and it’s easy. Somewhere in the middle of it, he sets down his fork. “When this is finished… I mean actually finished, Shilov handled and the estate clean, I want to take you somewhere.”
“Where?” I sip water while waiting.
“Anywhere that isn’t a room where someone might be watching you. You’ve spent every day since I met you performing for an audience. I want to take you somewhere you don’t have to be anyone.” He holds his water glass. “Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?”
I press my palm to my stomach without deciding but catch myself and lower it to the counter before he sees. I start breathing faster because he’s asking a question that has three new considerations.
“Nikita, I need to—” I say his name before I decide whether I can finish, and then I stop before the rest of it gets out.
He looks up with so much open in his face, the lightness from this morning still in it, the man who spent today describing a future instead of another escape.
I reach the edge of telling him. I can hear the three heartbeats again, and I remember how certain I was the moment Mila counted them.
I want to watch his face when he hears it.
Then I think about the email this morning, the five rooms, and the danger we’re still facing. If I tell him now, he has to hold hope and fear at the same time, when he has only just let himself believe in a future at all.
He deserves a calm moment when he learns about the triplets. I want to be the one who gives him a single thing that isn’t shadowed by the rest.
“You should tell me where you’d take me instead,” I say. “You already have a place. I can see it on your face.”
He starts naming places, and that’s when I understand I’ve misread the moment, because he doesn’t fumble.
He has an answer ready. There’s a house on the Amalfi Coast with no road to it, only a boat, where his mother took him and Angelina one summer before everything.
There’s a market in Istanbul where you can eat for three days and never repeat a stall, and a stretch of coast in Norway where the June light never fully leaves.
He lays it all out with dates and detail, like he hasn’t been guessing.
He’s already planned this. All of it. Somewhere in the last weeks, between the recoveries and the war, this man has quietly built an itinerary for a life he hasn’t let himself believe he’ll get. He is building it for two.
He doesn’t know he’s building it for five.
I nearly tell him several times while he talks. Each time I get to the edge, I decide a house with a target on it is no place to hand a man the best news of his life. I would rather give it to him whole. I make a promise instead of a confession.
I will tell him the next time this house gets quiet enough to belong only to the two of us. Until then, I hold the three of them close and listen to him plan for two.