Artem #2
A story.
I pull my hand back. "Let's focus."
We focus. The manifests blur. The gallery is silent.
THE FRIDAY SESSION goes first.
A notification through the staff portal, impersonal, system-generated. A. Almazov, Friday 6:30 AM, Cancelled. No note. No explanation.
No coffee, either.
I take the service stairs Saturday morning instead of the corridor past the spa.
Breakfast on the owner's deck, alone, facing the sea, and the mug in my hand is the thin porcelain from the suite's minibar and the coffee is the right temperature because nobody else is waiting for it, and I don't have to calculate walk times or ceramic density or the exact minute she arrives at the spa, and the simplicity of this should feel like relief.
It doesn't feel like anything.
I don't go to the engine room that night. The upper deck instead, the one where the wind is cold enough to make my hands ache. I stand at the railing and think about my father.
Daniil Almazov loved my mother with a ferocity that scared everyone who knew them.
Alexei told me once that our father would've dismantled the world brick by brick if she'd asked.
He didn't mean it as a compliment. He meant: love made our father reckless.
Love made him visible. And visible men get killed.
My father is dead. My mother is dead. The people who destroyed them are still out there, and I'm on this ship to find them, and Star Thornton is a girl who holds lace handkerchiefs and cries about the hands that made them and she has no place in this.
None.
I cancel Tuesday.
SHE COMES TO THE SPA on Tuesday anyway.
I know because Green mentions it, offhand, in the corridor. "Thornton was asking about your schedule, Mr. Almazov. I told her cancellations are processed through the portal."
"Thank you, Green."
"She seemed..." He pauses. Reconsiders. Chooses the word of a man who has decided to stay professional when he'd rather say something else. "She's a professional. She'll manage."
Green is a decent man. He chose his words carefully and I heard the ones he didn't say, the ones that lived in the pause between seemed and professional, and they sounded like she seemed gutted and you caused that and I hired her because she was the best I'd seen in nine years and you're going to break her.
Wednesday I pass her in the staff corridor on Deck 5.
She's coming from the gallery, I'm heading toward the casino, and the corridor is narrow and there's nowhere to go and I see her and she sees me and the flush starts at her throat, the same flush, the one that's been announcing her feelings since the corridor encounter, and her step falters for a quarter-second and then she straightens and her chin lifts and she walks toward me like she walks into a treatment room: shoulders square, hands at her sides, professional.
"Mr. Almazov."
Mr. Almazov. Not Artem. She's handed me back the formality like a key she's returning, and it cuts exactly as it should. Surgically. The same clean line as the scar on my shoulder blade, which her thumbs have traced forty times and will never trace again.
"Star."
I should keep walking. I keep walking.
"Is everything all right?" she asks.
Behind me. To my back. And I can hear what it costs her, the careful tone that isn't quite careful enough, the fracture running through it that she thinks she's concealing and she's not, she has never been able to conceal anything from me, and I keep walking because if I stop and turn around and see her face I'll cross the corridor and take her jaw in my hand, the same spot, always the same spot, and I'll say her name and she'll say mine and every wall I've rebuilt in the last five days will come down and I'll be visible again.
I'll be visible and she'll be standing next to me and visible men get killed and the people standing next to them get killed too.
"Fine," I manage. "Thank you."
My feet keep moving. Down the corridor, up the stairs, into the suite, onto the balcony. The water is grey and calm and I sit in the chair and I think: this is the right thing. This is the only thing. You're protecting her from yourself and that's the most decent thing you've done in years.
It doesn't feel decent.
It feels like closing a door on someone who was standing in the light.
THURSDAY. NO SESSION. I cancelled the full recurring block Monday. A. Almazov, Thursday 8:00 PM, Series cancelled.
The evening goes to the gallery. Mila, the laptop, the work.
Shipping logs, port manifests, the trail of paper that might lead us to the witness who can identify the man who ordered my father's death.
It requires focus and I don't have focus, because my focus is six decks below me restocking oils and folding towels and wondering what she did wrong.
She didn't do anything wrong. She didn't do a single thing wrong and I'm letting her believe she did and I know it and that knowledge sits in my chest like a coal.
"You're doing the right thing," Mila tells me, not glancing up from the screen.
I say nothing.
"It hurts now. It won't always." She scrolls. "Give it time."
I don't want time. I want Thursday at eight PM and cedarwood in a dim room and the sound of her flat shoes in the corridor and the way her hands read my body like a language she was born speaking.
I want the coffee calculation and the engine room and her shoulder against my arm at midnight and the lopsided smile she kept a gallery of, yes I knew about the gallery, I knew she was cataloguing them, I could see her filing each one away like a jeweller with a stone, and I didn't stop her because being collected by Star Thornton was the first time in five years I'd felt like something worth keeping.
"I know," I tell Mila.
She reaches across the desk and squeezes my hand. "She'll be fine. She's young. She'll recover. Give it a few weeks and she'll be laughing with Curtis again and you'll be a story she tells her friends."
A story.
I pull my hand back. "Let's focus."
The manifests blur.
SATURDAY NIGHT. ELEVEN PM. A knock on the door of Suite 12.
I know who it is before I open it. I know because no one knocks on this door. Mila has a key. Green calls ahead. The staff don't come to the guest suites uninvited. Only one person on this ship would knock.
Only one person on this ship would cross six decks in flat shoes and rolled trousers at eleven o'clock at night to stand outside a door she has no business approaching and knock, because Star Thornton doesn't perform and she doesn't build up to things and she doesn't let questions go unanswered. She just asks.
I open the door.
She's standing in the corridor in her uniform, hair pulled back, flat shoes, trousers rolled at the waist because they're still half an inch too long and she never hemmed them.
She's not crying. She's not flushed. She looks like a person who's been assembling courage for days, collecting it piece by piece, same as she collects beautiful things and almost-smiles and old lace, and has finally gathered enough to walk across the ship and up six decks and knock.
"What happened?" she demands.
Her voice is low. Calm and direct. Just the question, the same voice she uses when she asks about pressure preferences and the same voice she used when she whispered goodnight, Artem outside her cabin door and the same voice that has been asking me real questions in dim rooms for weeks and every time I've answered because her voice makes a room that my words walk into.
I can't walk into it this time.
I grip the door frame. My eyes trace the circles under hers and I put them there. The tight line of her mouth and I put that there too. Every small, visible mark of damage on her face, mine. I did that. The man who was supposed to protect her did that.
"Star."
"Don't." Her chin lifts. Not defiance. Something harder. Something that cost her every euro of courage she scraped together to come here. "Don't say my name like that and then close the door. Tell me what I did."
"You didn't do anything."
"Then what changed?"
I grip the door frame and my knuckles ache, the same knuckles she traced through oil every Thursday, the same knuckles she knows the topography of better than I do, and the ache runs from my hands up through my arms and into the place behind my ribs where I keep the things I can't say, and what I can't say is: nothing changed.
Everything is exactly the same. I want you in every room on this ship and in every hour of my day and in the engine room at midnight and on the upper deck in the dark and the only thing that changed is that someone I trust told me the truth, which is that wanting you will get you killed.
"I think it's best if you're reassigned," I tell her. "I'll speak to Green. Another therapist can take the sessions."
Her face does something I'll carry for the rest of my life.
It doesn't crumble. It doesn't break. It doesn't do any of the things that faces do when they receive news they can't absorb.
It goes still. Completely, terrifyingly still.
The stillness of a body absorbing a blow too large to express and too sudden to process, how a building goes still in the instant after an earthquake before anyone knows whether it's going to stand or fall.
She stands in that doorway and her face empties and her eyes don't blink and her hands, her extraordinary, irreplaceable, four-hundred-euro-an-hour hands, hang at her sides without moving.
She nods. Once.
She nods and I close the door and I stand on my side of it with my forehead against the wood and I listen to her footsteps. The soft flat shoes on the carpet. Walking away. Getting quieter.
Gone.
The suite is dark. The balcony doors are open.
The sea is black and the ship hums at sixty-two hertz and I'm standing at a closed door with my forehead pressed against it and my hands pressed against the wood as if I can feel her through it like she felt my scars through oil, as if proximity to the last surface she stood near is enough, and it isn't, it isn't even close, and the silence where her footsteps used to be is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
This is the right thing.
This is the right thing.
I'm going to keep telling myself that until it stops being a lie.