22. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I’m in the pool before six.
The house is still dark when I come downstairs, Marta not yet in, the kitchen cold and quiet.
I don’t turn the lights on. I find the pool by memory—through the glass corridor, through the door that opens with a keypad I had installed six years ago when I decided the pool room was the one place in this house I wanted to exist without staff.
The water is cold at first. Good. I need it cold.
I swim without counting laps. I don’t count anything at this hour.
I just move through the water and let the night clear out of my head, all of it—the faction briefing from yesterday, the three fronts still being monitored, the specific weight of last night that I’m not examining before I’ve had coffee.
I hear the door.
I’m at the far end when it opens. I come up and turn, and she’s standing at the edge of the pool in a black swimsuit, towel over one shoulder, and she sees me at the same moment I see her. She stops.
For a second, she just stands there. Then she takes a step back toward the door.
“Don’t leave on my account,” I say. “There’s enough room for both of us.”
She looks at me. “That’s the most human thing you’ve said to me,” she says.
I say nothing. I push off the wall and swim back to the far end.
She gets in.
She stays on her side, I stay on mine, and we swim in opposite directions for a while. The water is the only sound. After maybe ten minutes, she stops at the wall closest to me and pushes her hair back and looks at the ceiling.
“How long have you had this house?” she asks. Not like she cares. More like she’s run out of things to look at.
“Eleven years.”
“Do you like it?”
I look at her. “It’s useful.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
She looks back at the ceiling. “You don’t like anything, do you. You just have things.”
I consider that for a moment longer than I mean to. She’s not wrong exactly. She’s not entirely right either. I think about the pool at five in the morning, with the lights low and the house silent, and what I would call that if I had to call it something.
“I like this,” I say. “At this hour.”
She glances at me sideways.
“Don’t make it weird,” she says.
Something moves in my chest. Small. Uninvited. I look away from her and push off the wall. “I’ll be out of your way shortly,” I say.
She doesn’t answer. I swim two more lengths and pull myself out of the pool and reach for my towel, and I don’t look back at her in the water, because I already know what she looks like in the water, and looking again is not something I’m going to do.
Rico is in the corridor outside the pool room.
He has his phone in his hand, and the expression he gets when something has moved faster than expected. He holds the phone out to me without speaking. I read the message once.
She’s asking for you. The doctor says tonight or tomorrow. You should come now.
I hand the phone back.
“Get the car,” I say.
The house I grew up in is forty minutes north of the city, up a road that narrows as it climbs and opens onto a property that was grand once, a long time ago, and now carries its age the way certain people do—not badly, just honestly.
The paint on the gate is newer than everything else.
Someone repainted it last spring. I paid for it and never came to see it.
The housekeeper, a woman named Vera who has been here longer than I’ve been alive, opens the door before I reach it. She looks at me the way she’s looked at me since I was nine years old —like she’s conducting a rapid assessment of my current state and finding it acceptable but not excellent.
“She’s been awake since four,” Vera says. “Waiting.”
“I came as fast as I could.”
Vera says nothing to that. She steps aside and lets me in.
The house smells the same as it always has.
Old wood, something floral from the room at the end of the hall where Aunt Irina has kept dried flowers in a ceramic bowl since before I was born.
The floors creak under me in the same places.
I know every one of them. I used to run this hallway at full speed in socks when I was six and seven and eight, before I learned what this house actually was and what it required of the people who lived in it.
She’s in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.
Small now in the bed, smaller than I’ve ever seen her, which is the thing about the very old when they’re at the end—the body gives back all the space it spent a lifetime taking up.
Her hair is white and her hands on the blanket are thin and still, but her eyes when she opens them and finds me standing in the doorway are exactly the same as they’ve always been.
Sharp. Direct. Slightly amused, the way she has always been slightly amused by me, specifically, since I was old enough to give her a reason to be.
“You came,” she says.
“Of course I came.”
“Sit down. You’re making the room feel small standing there like that.”
I pull the chair to the side of the bed and sit. She looks at me for a long moment without saying anything, the way she used to look at me when I was a boy and she was deciding whether I’d done something wrong or simply something she hadn’t anticipated.
“You look tired,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
“You look tired and you look like something is on your mind. You’ve looked like that since you were twelve years old, Nikolai. I know the difference.”
I say nothing.
Her hand finds mine on the edge of the blanket. Thin fingers, still warm. “Tell me about the girl,” she says.
I look at her. “Who told you?”
“Vera reads the papers.” A pause. “The Morozov girl. I knew her father, years ago. Difficult man. His daughter is nothing like him, from what I understand.”
“No,” I say. “She’s not.”
“Do you love her?”
“Aunt Irina?—”
“I’m dying, Nikolai. I don’t have time for evasion.” She squeezes my hand, light but deliberate. “Do you love her?”
I sit with that for a moment. The room is quiet. Outside the window the property stretches out in the gray morning light, the same view it has always been.
“I don’t know what I feel,” I say. “That’s the honest answer.”
“Then feel it faster.” Her mouth moves in something that is almost a smile.
“You’ve spent your whole life managing things instead of having them.
The business, the men, the rooms full of people who need something from you.
” She looks at me directly. “I watched your father do the same thing. I watched what it left him with at the end.” A pause. “Don’t do that.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Isn’t it?”
I don’t answer.
She’s quiet for a while. Her breathing is slow, deliberate, the kind of breathing that takes effort.
I keep her hand in mine and I look at the window and I think about all the years I didn’t come up this road, all the Sundays and holidays and ordinary weeks that passed while I was in the city managing things.
“Build something real,” she says. Her voice is quieter now, the edges of it going soft.
“Not the business. Not the empire. Something that’s yours when everything else is gone.
” She pauses. “A family, Nikolai. A home that means something. Someone to come back to.” Her hand tightens once more. “Promise me you’ll try.”
I look at her.
“I’ll try,” I say.
She closes her eyes.
Twenty minutes later she’s gone, her hand still in mine, the room completely still except for the sound of the house settling around us and Vera crying softly in the hallway outside the door.
I sit there for a long time before I get up.
It’s past eight when Anton pulls through the gates.
The house is lit, Marta’s car in the drive, everything exactly as I left it. I come through the front door and hand my coat to no one because there’s no one in the entrance hall. The house is quiet in the evening way it gets quiet, different from the morning quiet, fuller somehow.
Nina is in the living room.
She’s on the sofa with the laptop open, legs pulled under her, a cup of something on the table beside her. She looks up when I come in. She takes one look at my face.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says.
I stop in the doorway.
She’s watching me with those dark eyes that miss nothing and never have, and the room is warm and I’m standing at the entrance of it with Aunt Irina’s last words still sitting in my chest like something physical, and there’s a version of tonight where I cross the room and I say something true for once.
I don’t.
“Goodnight, Nina,” I say.
I walk past her and up the stairs and I don’t look back, and the distance between what I did and what I needed is something I will sit with in the dark of my room for a long time before sleep comes.