23. Nina
NINA
I wake up with the laptop open beside me.
The screen has gone dark. The document is still open underneath, three hundred words I don’t remember finishing, the cursor blinking at the end of a sentence that stops mid-thought.
I close it and sit up. The room is gray.
The city outside is doing its early morning thing, quiet in the way it’s only quiet before six.
I go to the bathroom.
The mirror gives me back someone who slept in her clothes.
My hair has done something on the left side.
There are shadows under my eyes that have been there long enough now that I’ve stopped being surprised by them.
I wash my face, brush my teeth, and pull my hair into something that passes.
I look at myself for a moment longer than I need to.
I don’t look unhappy. That’s the part I keep noticing.
I change into a clean shirt and dark pants and go downstairs.
Nikolai is at the table with my piece open on his phone. He doesn’t look up. Just reads. I sit across from him and wait.
“The source you protected in the second section,” he says.
“Estonian financial authority, 2019 restructuring. Four people had that access. Two have been public enough that anyone paying attention can narrow it to the other two.” He sets the phone down.
“Your source has a problem if the wrong person reads it carefully.”
I go to the hallway and call my editor. Tell him to pull the attribution. He starts asking why, and I say I’ll tell him later and hang up.
When I come back, Nikolai is looking out the window. He has the look he’s had since he walked through the door last night. Not closed off. More like something is sitting with him that he hasn’t decided what to do with yet.
I sit down.
“What happened last night?” I ask.
He looks at me.
“My aunt,” he says. “She passed.” His hands are still around his cup in a way that is slightly too still. His face gives me nothing else.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He’s quiet for a moment.
“She was ready,” he says. “She’d been ready for a while.”
The table is quiet. Outside, a car passes. I don’t push, and he doesn’t offer more, and we sit there in the particular silence of two people who have stopped pretending they are strangers.
At six, he appears in the doorway of the library. “We have somewhere to be,” he says. “An hour.”
“What kind of somewhere?”
“The kind that doesn’t require a briefing folder.”
I close the laptop.
The dress Marta brings is dark blue, simple, something that will work in any room.
In the car, Anton drives, Rico sits in front, Nikolai is beside me, and the city moves past the windows. Neither of us speaks, which is not the silence of the early weeks. That silence had edges. This one doesn’t.
The venue is mid-sized, a private event space in the fifties, the kind of room that sits on the border of two worlds without belonging entirely to either.
A hundred people, maybe slightly more. I read the room in the first five minutes.
Legitimate money on one side, less legitimate on the other, everybody pretending it’s all the same thing.
I take his arm at the entrance. He doesn’t react. We go in.
I work the room the way I always work rooms. I find the threads, read the groupings, figure out who defers to whom, and who is performing what for whose benefit.
A woman near the bar has been watching Nikolai since we walked in. Blonde, early fifties, the kind of composed that takes years to build. She’s not watching him the way women watch powerful men at parties. She’s watching him the way someone watches a door they used to walk through.
I excuse myself from the conversation I’m in and cross to the bar.
“Nina Vasin,” I say, holding out my hand.
She takes it. Her grip is firm. “Lena Sorokina.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “I know your husband.”
“Most people here do.”
She looks at me with something close to appraisal. “He’s different with you in the room.”
“Different how?”
She picks up her drink. “Less far away,” she says, and moves on before I can answer that.
I stand at the bar for a moment.
Then I go back to the room.
Nikolai moves through the evening beside me and slightly behind me, close enough that the room reads us correctly, far enough that I have space to work.
He doesn’t direct me. Doesn’t manage me.
He stays close and watches, and I’m aware of him the whole time, the way I’ve been aware of him since the church, without trying, without meaning to.
At some point, a woman introduces herself to both of us. Art dealer, mid-fifties, warm and direct. She asks how long we have been married.
I open my mouth.
“Long enough,” Nikolai says.
He looks at me when he says it. Not at her. At me, directly, with that steadiness that has nowhere to hide in it, and the art dealer laughs and says something I don’t catch because I’m looking back at him, and the room has gone slightly irrelevant for a second.
I turn back to the room.
My face is doing something I’m not going to examine right now.
Across the space, I catch Lena Sorokina watching us. She raises her glass slightly in my direction, something between acknowledgment and amusement, and looks away.
An hour later, he appears at my elbow. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
We say our goodbyes and go out to the car.
There’s a step down from the entrance that’s slick from the rain, and I don’t see it in time. I catch myself, but not fully, one hand grabbing at air, and then his hand is at my elbow, firm, before I’ve finished losing my balance.
“You alright?” His voice is quiet. Close.
I straighten up. Heat crawls up the back of my neck, and I’m grateful for the dark.
“Fine,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t let go of my elbow until I’ve cleared the step, and then he does, and we get in the car, and I look out my window the whole way home.