19. Nina
NINA
The balcony is cold, but I don’t go in. I’ve been out here since after dinner, the city doing its usual thing below me, and I’m at the railing when Sofiya calls.
I pick up on the second ring.
“I was going to call you,” I say.
“I know. That’s why I called first.” A pause. “How bad?”
She waits.
“Dominique called,” I say. “The story ran yesterday.”
“Which story?”
“The big one. Three countries. Two years of sourcing.”
A pause. “Someone else ran it.”
“Viktor Hale.”
“Nina.” She says my name the way she says it when she already understands and doesn’t need the rest.
“I introduced him to two of those contacts. In Vienna. Four years ago.” I look at the street below.
“How are you?”
“I’m standing on a balcony in the cold so I don’t have to be inside.”
“That bad.”
“That bad.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“Do you remember,” she says, “when you came home from Warsaw that first time?”
“Sofiya—”
“Just listen.”
I lean on the railing.
“You were twenty-six. You came home for Christmas, and you didn’t leave the house for four days.
Papa thought you were being difficult, which he said out loud, because he has never once understood the difference between difficult and devastated.
” She pauses. “You stayed in your room with the lights off. I sat outside your door on the hallway floor for two days because I didn’t know what else to do. ”
“I remember.”
“On the third day, you opened the door and sat down next to me, and you said—I remember exactly—‘I think I have broken my own life and I don’t know how to come back from it.’ You weren’t talking about Warsaw.
You were talking about Daniel. Three years.
An entire life you thought you were building.
” She pauses. “You got to the end and found out it wasn’t what you thought, and you had given up everything else to be there. ”
I look at the city.
She continues. “I didn’t know what to say.
I was younger and I had nothing useful. So I held your hand for about six hours.
” Another pause. “And then you got up. No plan. No money. No reason to believe anything would be different. You packed the same bag, bought a ticket, went back to Warsaw, and you didn’t come home again for three years. ”
“I know what I did.”
“Not because you knew it would work,” she says. “Because sitting on that floor wasn’t who you are.” She lets it sit. “This is the floor, Nina. That’s all this is. You’ve been here before.”
I don’t answer.
“Call me tomorrow,” she says.
“I will.”
“Nina.”
“I said I will.”
She hangs up.
I stay on the balcony until the cold gets into my fingers properly. Then I go inside, wash my face, get into bed, and lie in the dark for a long time before sleep comes.
In the morning, I reach for my phone before I open my eyes.
The screen stays black.
I press the power button. Nothing. I hold it down. Nothing. I plug it into the charger and watch it. Nothing happens. I sit up.
I look at the laptop on the desk.
I get up and open it. The log-in screen appears, and I enter my password. Incorrect. I try again. Incorrect. For the third time, careful with every key. The screen shows a lockout warning and turns gray.
I sit very still.
I know what this is. I’ve spent ten years reporting on people who went dark overnight, operations that vanished in the space of a few hours.
I know what it looks like when every line cuts at the same time, and I know it’s never an accident, and I know there’s only one person in this house who could have done it.
I get up.
I open the door, and I don’t bother keeping my voice down.
“Nikolai.”
Nothing.
“Nikolai.”
I go down the hall. Down the stairs. Fast. At the bottom, Marta steps out of the kitchen and nearly walks into me, her eyes going wide.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“His study, Mrs. Vasin, he said?—”
I’m already past her.
The study door is closed. I open it.
He’s standing at the window with his back to me, hands in his pockets, looking at the garden. He doesn’t turn around.
I cross the room, and I hit him. Both hands flat against his back, hard.
He doesn’t move. I hit him again, and he turns, and I go for his chest, his shoulder, anything I can reach, and he takes every bit of it without stepping back, without raising his hands, without doing anything except standing there and absorbing it.
“What did you do?” I hit him again. “My phone—my laptop—what did you do?—”
He catches my wrists. Firm. Both hands. He holds them and looks at me and says, “Sit down.”
“Let go?—”
“Sit down, Nina.”
I pull my wrists back, and he releases them.
I take three steps back and look around the study, and I pick up the stack of folders from the edge of the desk and throw them.
Papers across the floor. He watches them fall.
I grab the wooden tray from the corner of the desk and throw that too. It hits the bookcase and drops.
He doesn’t move. I stop. My hands are shaking. My chest is heaving. He’s standing exactly where he was, watching me, giving me nothing.
I sit in the chair.
He comes around the desk, opens the drawer, and sets a file in front of me. He steps back.
I look at it. I open it. My handwriting is in the margin of the third page. A note I made to myself six weeks ago. I look at my own handwriting inside his file, and something in my chest goes very cold.
I read every page. My sourcing structure. My sequencing. The Reeves thread is laid out in clean columns with dates and timestamps. Six weeks of work that I built carefully and believed in completely, sitting in a folder in this man’s desk drawer.
I close it. “Say it,” I say.
“Every outside line is gone. Your phone, your laptop, your contacts. Nothing moves in or out of this house that doesn’t come through me.” His voice is even. “That is not up for discussion.”
“You went through my work.”
“Yes.”
“You sat across from me at dinner last night. You poured my wine. You said nothing.” I stand up. “I’m a journalist. That file is my career. My sources. My access. Ten years of work that existed before you ever stopped that wedding, and you went through it like it was yours.”
“You were building a federal case against me from inside my home,” he says. “What did you expect me to do?”
“Come to me.” My voice is rising. “Say something. I have been straight with you?—”
“Have you?”
I stop.
He looks at me steadily. “You’ve been running two tracks since the night of the truck.
You have sat across from me at every table in this house, and you have managed the gap between them and called it something other than what it was.
” He doesn’t raise his voice. “I’m not saying this to punish you. I’m telling you what it was.”
“Don’t be reasonable right now.” My voice cracks slightly. “You took everything. The only things in this house that were ever mine. You made that decision while I was asleep, and you expect me to sit here and be calm about it.”
He says nothing.
“Say something that isn’t a verdict.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. “That’s the only thing I decided.”
“That’s not the only thing, and we both know it.”
He doesn’t answer. He stands there and holds every word I throw at him and gives me nothing to grab onto, and the fight runs completely off the rails.
I stand up.
“I want my laptop back,” I say. “Something. Some version of access.”
“Not today.”
“Then we’re done today.”
I walk out. Marta has disappeared. Smart woman. I go up the stairs and into my room and close the door.