Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
MIRA
Jax doesn’t come on Tuesday morning, and Maya appears instead.
She arrives at half past eight with a plate, her accounts folder, and the settled energy of a woman who has somewhere to be after this and is allocating her time accordingly.
She sets the food on the table, opens the folder across her knees, and starts reading, and we exist in the same space without either of us needing to fill it, which is one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about her.
I eat and look out the south window.
A prospect is moving between the workshop and the storage building, breath fogging in the cold.
Two men stand at the gate in their regular positions, shifting their weight against the temperature.
The mountains loom behind everything, white at the peaks now, so clear this morning that the ridgeline looks like it was cut with something sharp.
Eleven days.
I finish eating, push the plate aside, and pick up the gas station phone. Checking it has become a morning habit without me deciding to make it one. Doc’s messages, weather alerts, and the check-in confirmations that come through at thirty-minute intervals from whoever is on duty overnight.
I scroll through, and then I stop.
I open the browser.
I know I’m not supposed to do this. Reeve was specific about outside contact, about digital footprints, about the various ways a person can be located through the accounts they access and the servers those accounts live on.
I know all of that. I open the browser anyway, and I navigate to my personal email, the address I’ve had since university, the one I used for the translation work and the conference correspondence, and the personal life that existed before Seattle and Viktor, and a folder tied with a black ribbon.
I tell myself I’m checking for anything urgent.
I scroll past forty-three unread emails, and I’m about to close the browser when I see Dmitri’s name. Not once. Four times, on four different dates over the past eleven days, the most recent sent yesterday evening.
I look at the screen for a moment.
Then I open the first one.
Mira. I heard you left Viktor. I don’t know where you are. I just want to know you’re safe. Can you call me? Or email back. Just let me know you’re okay.
Dated the day after I left Seattle.
I read it twice. It sounds like a brother who is worried. It sounds genuine. I know Dmitri’s writing patterns. He’s always been like this, short sentences when he’s anxious, longer ones when he has time to think and isn’t.
I open the second email. Three days later.
Mira. I know you’re not going to respond. I know you’re angry with me, or scared, or both. I just need to know you’re alive. Viktor’s been asking questions, and I’ve been telling him nothing because I don’t know anything. That’s the truth. Please just tell me you’re safe.
I sit with that one.
Viktor’s been asking questions. Dmitri’s been saying nothing.
I open the third email. Five days after the second.
I know you found something. I don’t know what, but I know you.
You wouldn’t run without a reason, and you wouldn’t leave without proof of the reason.
I’ve been thinking about what that proof might look like, and I keep coming back to the same place, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Call me. Please.
I put the phone down on the table.
Maya looks up from her folder. “Everything alright?”
“My brother is emailing me.”
She doesn’t react dramatically. “What does he want?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I say.
I pick up the phone again and open the fourth email. It’s from yesterday evening.
Mira.
I need to tell you something, and I need to say it properly.
When Viktor approached me four years ago, he told me he was interested in meeting you.
He said he’d seen your work, your translation credentials, a paper you’d written that got some attention in certain circles.
He said he admired your intelligence. I believed that.
I wanted to believe it because he was also talking about a position in his organization for me, a real position, not the low-level work I’d been doing.
I told myself those two things were separate.
I was introducing my sister to a man who was genuinely interested in her, and, coincidentally, a business arrangement was also being discussed.
I knew they weren’t separate. I just didn’t want to look at what they actually were.
I didn’t know what he was planning. I want you to understand that.
I didn’t know about any plan to remove you.
I thought he married you because you were exactly what he said you were: intelligent, capable, presentable, the kind of woman a man like him would want permanently.
I thought you would have a life, a difficult one maybe, but a real one.
I didn’t ask questions I should have asked.
I didn’t check on you the way I should have.
I told myself the distance between us was normal and that you would tell me if something was wrong, and I used that to avoid thinking about what I already knew: I sold you to a man I didn’t fully understand for a position that made my life easier.
I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t fix anything. I know you probably don’t want to hear from me. But I needed you to know that I know what I did, and that I’m sorry, and that if there’s anything I can do from here, I will do it.
Dmitri.
I read it all the way through once.
Then I put the phone face down on the table and look out the window.
The two men at the gate are still in their positions. The mountains are still there. Maya is still in her chair with her accounts folder, watching me with the particular quality of attention that doesn’t push.
Dmitri is four years younger than me and we were never close in the way siblings are close when the family around them gives them reasons to be. We grew up in a house in Portland that was functional and quiet and didn’t produce the kind of closeness that requires warmth to develop.
I left when I was twenty-two, and I sent postcards, called twice a year, and told myself that was enough contact for a relationship that had never been more than proximity.
He introduced me to Viktor at a dinner I almost didn’t attend.
I remember the way Dmitri moved through that room. Brighter than usual, and more confident. He introduced us across the table, and Viktor listened to me with his full attention.
I pick the phone back up and open a reply window.
I type one sentence: You traded me for a position. Don’t contact me again.
I send it before I can think about whether it’s the right response, because it is the right response, and thinking about it further would only produce the same sentence with more words around it.
I go to the sent folder and delete the sent email.
Go to the inbox and delete all four of his emails. Empty the trash.
Done.
Maya is still looking at me.
“Former family,” I say.
She holds my gaze for a moment, then nods and goes back to her folder.
* * *
Jax comes at six.
He doesn’t bring food this time. He knocks, and when I open the door, he’s in a gray shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his hands in his pockets, and he looks at me for a moment before he says anything, reading something in my face that I wasn’t aware of putting there.
“Bad day?” he says.
“Defining moment,” I say. “Come in.”
He comes in and sits in the chair, and I sit on the edge of the bed.
I tell him about Dmitri’s emails in the same way I tell him everything, factually and without conveying the emotional content of it. He listens without interrupting, which is one of the things about him I’ve stopped pretending not to notice.
There are several things about Jax I’ve stopped pretending not to notice.
The way he fills a room without trying. The hands, which I noticed the first night in the bar when he lifted my bag off my shoulder with a movement so smooth I didn’t clock it until it was already done.
The jaw. The green eyes that appear relaxed but are not relaxed at all when you know what to look for.
I know what to look for now.
I’ve been looking for eleven days, and I’ve been filing what I see in the same place I file everything that doesn’t have an immediate use, and the file has been getting full.
He doesn’t say anything when I finish telling him about Dmitri. He looks at the window for a moment with his elbows on his knees, and then he looks back at me. “How are you?” he says.
“Cleaner,” I say. “It’s strange. It should feel worse, and it feels cleaner.”
“Because you already knew,” he says.
I look at him.
“Not the specifics,” he says. “But the shape of it. You already knew the shape of it, and now you have the words for it. That’s different from finding out something you didn’t know.”
I sit with that for a moment.
He’s right, and the fact that he’s right without me having to explain the distinction to him is something I add to the file without looking at it directly.
“My last external connection,” I say. “He was it. There’s no one left outside this fence line who knows I’m here.”
Jax looks at me steadily. “There are people inside it,” he says.
It’s a simple sentence, and he says it simply, without weight or emphasis, just as a fact being stated. But it lands the way simple true things land when you’ve been braced for something more complicated, and I look at him, and he looks back at me, and the room is very quiet for a moment.
“Yeah,” I say. “There are.”
He stays for two hours.
We talk about things that have nothing to do with Viktor or Dmitri or the compound’s security protocols, small things, the kind of conversation that happens when two people have stopped performing anything for each other.
He tells me about a bar fight he broke up at nineteen that led to him accidentally befriending the man he was trying to eject from the premises, who then followed him around town for the next six months.
He tells it with the self-deprecating timing of someone who is genuinely funny rather than someone who’s trying to be, and I laugh, and the laugh feels so unfamiliar in my own chest that I notice it happening.
When he leaves, he stops at the door and looks back at me.
“You’re going to be alright,” he says.