37. Nina
NINA
The box arrives on a Thursday morning with my landlord’s handwriting on the label and eight months of forwarded mail rubber-banded to the side.
Marta puts it on the kitchen table, and I stand there looking at it for a moment before I get a knife and cut the tape.
Inside, the smell hits first. My old apartment, the combination of the coffee I kept on the counter and the paper smell of too many notebooks in a small space.
I haven’t smelled that in eight months. I didn’t realize I’d missed it until now.
I start with the mail.
Bills that have been handled automatically for months, two magazine subscriptions I forgot I had, a card from a colleague in Brussels that arrived in January and is only reaching me now.
I read it and set it aside. Then the press credentials, three of them from different years, my photograph getting slightly more tired in each one in the way photographs do when the years in them were not easy.
I line them up on the table and look at them.
Twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-nine.
The woman in the twenty-fourth credential has no idea what’s coming. She looks like someone who has already decided everything, jaw set, eyes straight, the expression of someone who has mistaken certainty for knowledge. I look at her for a long time.
The notebooks come next, six of them, the ones I left behind when I packed light for a four-day trip home.
I open the most recent one and read three pages of reporting notes from a piece I was working on in February.
The handwriting is mine, and the shorthand is mine, and it feels like reading something written by someone I used to know well.
At the bottom of the box, wrapped in a page torn from a newspaper, is a book.
I know the handwriting on the note tucked inside the cover before I finish reading the first word.
Daniel.
I haven’t thought about Daniel in months, which tells me something about what that was.
A man I saw occasionally in the months before the wedding, nothing serious, nothing with a future attached to it, but real in the way of two people who liked each other and were both too busy to do anything about it.
The book is one I mentioned once, in passing, over dinner, that I had been meaning to read. I don’t remember mentioning it. He remembered it.
I read the note. It’s short and warm and entirely without expectation, the note of a man who has accepted that I’m not coming back and wishes me well anyway. I sit with it for a moment.
I think about the Tuesday morning flight.
I almost didn’t book it. I remember standing in my apartment with the laptop open on the airline website, thinking about four days in New York, my mother’s handkerchief, my father’s measured warmth, a wedding I had no interest in attending for a sister I talked to every day.
I almost closed the tab. I almost stayed in Manhattan, sent Sofiya flowers, and called it a reasonable decision.
I think about what that life looks like from here.
The apartment, the work, Daniel and his book recommendations, the Tuesday mornings, the Warsaw pieces, and the life I had built very carefully over ten years to belong entirely to myself.
I was good at that life. Genuinely good at it.
I can see it clearly from this distance without romanticizing it.
It was real, and it was mine, and I was not unhappy in it.
I just don’t want it back.
That’s the thing I sit with at the kitchen table with the press credentials lined up in front of me and Daniel’s note in my hand. I don’t want it back.
Not the apartment, not the careful solitude, not the life that had no room for anything that couldn’t be filed or published or taken apart and understood. I don’t regret a single day of it. I also don’t want to go back. Both things are true, and I’m done pretending they aren’t.
I put Daniel’s note back in the book and set it aside.
I take my phone to the garden.
My editor picks up on the second ring. He sounds like a man who has been waiting for this call.
“I need a leave of absence,” I say. “Indefinite.”
Silence. Then, “Nina.”
“I know.”
“The Baltic piece got picked up by four international outlets last week. You are in the best professional position you’ve been in since Warsaw, and you want a leave of absence.”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Personal reasons.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have right now.” I look at the garden, the bare rose beds, the lower path where I’ve run every morning for eight months. “I’ll come back. I’m not walking away from the work. I need time.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. “Three months,” he says finally. “I’ll hold your column for three months.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Come back with something extraordinary.”
I hang up and sit in the garden with the phone in my lap and the winter light doing what it does this time of year, flat and honest, and I go through it.
Every choice since the flight.
The church and the wedding and the forty minutes of negotiation I wasn’t part of.
The estate and the exits I counted, the three escape attempts, and the back of a supply truck on a dark road outside the city.
Reeves and the encrypted channel, and the weeks I spent believing I was building something that would matter.
The story. The night I took it apart. The breakfast three days ago, and two words across a table, and a hand reaching for mine.
I sit with all of it.
I don’t regret any of it.
That surprises me more than anything has in the past eight months, more than the wedding and the estate and the man who stopped a ceremony and turned my life inside out without asking permission.
I thought I would regret some of it. The escape attempts at least, or the Reeves file, or the story I killed. Something in the sequence should feel like a loss.
None of it does.
The kitchen door opens behind me.
Nikolai comes out with two cups, tea for me, coffee for himself, and sits in the chair beside me without asking about the call or the box or the book still sitting on the kitchen table. He hands me the cup. I take it.
I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the twenty-four credential, the one with the woman who thought she knew everything, and I hold it out to him.
He takes it. Look at it for a moment.
“You look annoyed,” he says.
“I was always annoyed.” I take the credential back. “I just hid it better back then.”
He looks at me. “You don’t hide it at all anymore,” he says.
I look at the garden and drink my tea and think that he’s right, I don’t, and that not hiding it feels like the most honest thing about the last eight months.
We sit in the garden until the light changes, and neither of us says anything else, and that is enough.