Chapter Five #2
She crossed to the bed and bent down to embrace me, and the hug was different from Katya's in ways I couldn't articulate immediately.
It was the right shape. The right duration.
The right amount of pressure. But it felt like a performance of a hug rather than a hug, as if someone had studied the choreography but couldn't quite hear the music.
I was being uncharitable. Maria had always been good to me. She paid well, she was generous with time off, and her children—Sasha, Luka, and tiny Anya—were the brightest spots in my life before everything went dark. I had no reason to distrust her concern.
But something about Maria's smile didn't quite reach the same depth as her words.
"You look so much better than I expected," Maria said, settling herself on the chair Doc usually occupied with the ease of someone accustomed to making any space her own.
She crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt, and tilted her head at an angle that conveyed sympathetic interest. "When Katya told me—well, I won't upset you with the details.
The important thing is that you're safe now. "
"She is," Xavier said from the doorway. Quiet. Definitive. Two words that drew a line in the air like a perimeter fence.
Maria's gaze slid to him, and I watched her perform the same assessment Katya had, but with a different conclusion.
Where Katya had seen a protector and granted him cautious respect, Maria saw something else—an obstacle, maybe, or an unknown variable in an equation she'd already been solving in her head.
Her smile didn't waver, but her eyes sharpened.
She extended her hand with the kind of grace that made the gesture look like she was conferring an honor rather than requesting a handshake. "I can't thank you enough for what you and your team did."
Xavier shook her hand. Brief, professional, the handshake of a man who was being polite because the woman he was protecting had guests, not because he felt any particular need to be liked.
"She's in good hands," he said, and it wasn't a reassurance. It was a statement of territorial fact. He glanced at me. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything.”
Maria's smile flickered as Xavier left. A nanosecond adjustment that someone less hypervigilant than I'd become might have missed entirely. "I’m so glad you seem comfortable. Such a huge change to your apartment must be—"
"My apartment," I said in alarm. I hadn't thought about my apartment.
Hadn't thought about the little one-bedroom on Elm Street with its creaky floors and the window that stuck and the shelf of picture books I'd collected for story time with Sasha and Luka.
It existed in the Before, and the Before was a country I'd been deported from. "I don't even know if my rent—"
"Boris handled it," Katya said quickly, her hand tightening on mine. "Your apartment is exactly as you left it. The landlord waived your rent and keep things maintained. Your things are safe."
The relief was distant, theoretical. Like being told your house survived a hurricane when you were still standing in the floodwater.
"The children have missed you so much," Maria said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, and her voice had shifted into something warmer, more intimate, the voice of a woman confiding in a friend rather than checking on a patient.
"Anya won't stop asking where Molly went.
And Luka's been acting out at school—his teacher called me twice last week.
I've been managing on my own, of course, but it's been—" She caught herself, waving a hand as if swatting the complaint away.
"No, that's not important right now. What matters is you. "
But I'd heard it. The carefully planted seed, wrapped in self-deprecation and maternal concern.
I've been managing on my own. The unspoken corollary: and it's been difficult, and I need you back. Which was ridiculous. I only cared for the children on Sheila’s days off. Which meant Maria was only having to manage two days a week. College was another thing I’d have to sort out, but I firmly pushed that thought away.
"Maria." Katya's voice carried a note of warning, the kind of tone that passed between family members who'd had this conversation before.
"What? I'm not saying anything." Maria held up both hands, the picture of innocence.
"I'm just telling her the children miss her.
That's all. Children are allowed to miss people.
" She turned back to me with that calibrated smile.
"We don't have to talk about any of that now.
You just focus on getting better. Although—" She glanced around the bedroom with an expression that was meticulously casual.
"I do wonder if you wouldn't be more comfortable somewhere more... familiar? Your own space, your own things, or recuperate at mine. You know we’d love to have you.
I'm sure Mr. Moreno has been incredibly generous, but this can't be a long-term arrangement. You must feel like you're imposing."
The word landed like a knife in my chest.
Imposing.
I looked down at my hands—still trembling, still wrapped in the gauze Doc had applied this morning to the raw skin on my wrists where the restraint marks were healing.
I was sitting in a man's bed, wearing a man's t-shirt because I preferred them to my own clothes.
I was tethered to a fluid bag hanging from a coat hook.
I hadn't showered without someone standing outside the bathroom door in case I collapsed.
I couldn't sleep without his heartbeat under my ear.
Imposing.
Of course I was imposing. What else would you call this?
A grown woman who couldn't function without a man she'd known for two days holding her hand and calling her good girl and cutting her banana into pieces the size of a pinky nail.
A woman who called him Daddy and clung to him like a child because the alternative was facing the vast, howling emptiness of what had been done to her with no one standing between her and the void.
He'd signed up to rescue me. Not to become my nursemaid.
Not to sleep sitting up for two nights straight because I couldn't let go of him long enough for him to lie flat.
Not to hold a basin while I vomited and wiped my face and tell me I was brave when we both knew I was anything but.
Was Maria right? Should I be staying here?