17. Harper
HARPER
Saturday starts the way most of our Saturdays do now, Viktor making coffee before either of us is fully awake, Ginger negotiating for pancakes instead of the cereal I’d normally hand her.
“You said Saturdays were pancake days,” she reminds him, climbing onto a stool at the counter with the total confidence of someone citing established law.
“Did I say that, or did you decide that’s what I said?”
“Same thing.”
He makes the pancakes anyway, and I watch the two of them from the doorway, still half asleep, marveling at how completely this has become a routine neither of us set out to build on purpose.
Nobody mentions today’s difference until she’s dressed and I’m double-checking she’s got her favorite stuffed rabbit tucked into her backpack, something small to hold onto if the next two hours get overwhelming.
“You ready?” I ask her.
“I guess.” She shrugs, the same noncommittal shrug she’s given most things about today since I told her. “Will Viktor really come to the drop-off?”
“I said I would,” Viktor says from the doorway, keys already in hand. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
Ginger nods like that settles it, and climbs into the back seat without further comment, and the three of us drive to the family center in a quiet that isn’t quite comfortable and isn’t quite tense either, a mood I don’t have a name for yet.
I notice Viktor’s hands on the wheel first, gripping tighter than the drive requires. Then his jaw, set in the same way it was the day of the hearing, the day I still don’t fully understand.
“You okay?” I ask quietly, once Ginger’s distracted with something out the window.
“Fine.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true, mostly.” He glances at me, the tightness at his jaw easing slightly even though the strain underneath doesn’t fully go anywhere. “I don’t love the idea of her in a room with them. That’s all this is.”
It’s not all this is.
I’ve learned enough about this man to know when he’s giving me the edited version of something.
Still, I also know pushing rarely gets me the rest of it any faster, so I let it go and watch the family center come into view instead, a squat beige building that looks more like a dentist’s office than anything else.
The monitor meets us at the door, pleasant and businesslike, and walks Ginger through what to expect in a tone clearly practiced on dozens of kids before her.
Ginger holds my hand until the very last second, then lets go and walks in on her own, her rabbit clutched under one arm, small and steady in a way that makes my chest ache with pride and worry in equal measure.
Viktor doesn’t move from the doorway until she’s fully out of sight.
“Two hours,” I say, mostly to fill the silence. “We could get lunch. Or run errands. Whatever keeps us from just standing in a parking lot the entire time.”
“Errands,” he agrees, already turning back toward the car, like motion is the only thing keeping him from thinking too hard about what’s happening inside that building.
We end up at the grocery store, of all places, filling a cart with things Ginger likes and things Viktor’s decided the kitchen needs, a domestic errand that feels almost absurdly normal given where we just left her.
“You’re better at this than I expected,” I tell him, watching him compare two brands of pasta sauce with genuine consideration.
“Better at what, grocery shopping?”
“Being a person who does regular things. Normal husband things.”
“I contain multitudes, Harper. We’ve discussed this.”
“You mentioned. I’m still collecting evidence for my file.”
“Add grocery shopping to it, then. Right next to helping with dioramas and losing pizza negotiations to a six-year-old.”
I laugh, and for a moment the tension from the car actually eases off his shoulders, and we finish the shopping trip talking about nothing important, an easy back and forth that used to take real effort between us and now happens.
He insists on carrying all six bags himself at the register, waving off the teenager’s offer of help while bagging our groceries.
I tease him about it the entire walk to the car, and for those few minutes, I forget entirely what’s happening two miles away inside a beige building with a stranger’s clipboard keeping watch.
By the time we pick Ginger up, she’s quiet again, though not the same withdrawn quiet from those first weeks in Viktor’s house. This feels more like processing than retreating.
She climbs into the back seat and buckles herself in with the same focused seriousness she brought to everything in those early days, and for a moment I brace myself for something worse than what she actually gives me.
“How was it?” I ask once we’re in the car.
“Fine. Grandma cried a little. Grandpa mostly just watched me color.”
“Watched you color?”
“He didn’t say much. He just watched, like he was trying to remember what I look like.” She says it matter-of-fact, the way kids report strange adult behavior without fully understanding its weight. “It was kind of weird.”
“Did they say anything else? Anything that upset you?”
“Not really. Grandma asked if I was happy. I said yes.” She shrugs, already moving past it, more interested in the radio than the conversation now that the actual event is behind her. “Can we get ice cream on the way home?”
“We’ll see.”
“That’s not a no.”
“No,” I say, echoing a phrase she’s clearly picked up from someone in this car. “It’s not.”
I glance at Viktor in the rearview mirror. His face has gone completely blank in a way I recognize now, the same stillness from the courthouse, and I file the detail away without understanding why it matters, the way I’ve apparently learned to file away half of what unsettles him.
That night, after Ginger’s down and the house has gone quiet, Viktor finds me in the kitchen, and neither of us says anything about the visitation, or the grocery store, or any of the small, ordinary moments that made up the day.
We just exist in the same space, the way we do most nights now, him reading something at the counter, me finishing paperwork from work, occasionally trading a comment about nothing that matters.
It’s not that we’re avoiding the subject exactly. It’s more that neither of us seems to need to say it out loud anymore, the way you stop narrating things once they’ve become simply true.
It hits me, watching him from across the kitchen, that I’ve stopped keeping track of where the arrangement ends and whatever this actually is begins.
There isn’t a clean line between them anymore, hasn’t been for weeks, and I’m not sure either of us is in any hurry to go looking for where it used to be.
A year ago I couldn’t have imagined a version of my life that included a man like Viktor Markov standing at my kitchen counter on a Saturday night, reading something with his sleeves pushed up, entirely unremarkable in a way that used to feel impossible for anyone in my life to be.
“Bed?” he asks eventually, setting his book aside.
“In a minute.”
He kisses the top of my head on his way past, easy, unremarkable, a gesture that would have felt impossible four months ago and now barely registers as anything except ordinary.
I sit there a while longer, thinking about the way Pavel watched Ginger color, and about Viktor’s face in the rearview mirror, giving nothing away.
Whatever he’s not telling me, I’m not going to push tonight. I trust him.
Which still surprises me some days.