Chapter 30
MILA
The folding knife has been in my hand a long time. I have not opened it since the corridor at Casa Lucia, but I have cleaned it, wiped the blade, and the scrap of his sleeve has been taken by Marco. The blade smells of cleaning oil now, not blood.
I have decided to go down. To be in the room where he can find me. I do not know what I want from him when he gets there. I know I am done being alone with what I am carrying and he is the only person in this house who knows the weight of it.
That is enough of a reason. That is the only reason I have.
I put on the chain at my throat under the high collar. I close my left hand around the knife. I walk down the stairs.
The library is empty. Cassia is in the medical wing with Sofia and Izzy.
Sofia is stable. She woke this morning and said Izzy twice and asked for water and went back to sleep, and when they told me I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my fist against my sternum and breathed until the shaking stopped.
The household has left the library to me tonight.
I sit in the chair Cassia gave me, the chair by the window, and the garden is going dark outside, the sun at the edge of the magnolia, the jasmine coming up strong in the heat the way it does after sundown.
I lay the folding knife on the small table beside the chair. I open it. The blade catches the lamp.
I am armed. I am choosing to be here anyway. I am angry at him and I still want him and I do not know what to do with both things living in me at the same time except sit here and feel them.
I do not call him. I need him to come to me. I need it to be his choice.
His steps in the gallery. The cadence I have learned over weeks of listening for it, but slower tonight, careful, the slight unevenness that wasn’t there before the rescue. He is still hurt. My chest pulls with something I don’t want to name and I name it anyway.
Worried. Still angry.
He stops at the doorway of the library.
I do not turn my head. I look at the window. My jaw goes loose. A breath out through my nose. I do not speak.
He waits in the doorway.
My hands stay in my lap. I count one breath. Two. Three. Four.
The first verse of Tonkaya Ryabina opens in my throat.
I have not sung this song since they took me. I have hummed it in the dark when I thought no one could hear. I have played it on the violin with the door closed. I have not been able to sing it to anyone except Yelena.
I open my mouth.
My voice comes out rougher than I expected, thick with rust, and my body has forgotten how to push air across vowels in the shape music wants. But my throat knows it. The way my body knew the violin before my hands could hold it, the way the song lived in the part of me that nothing took.
The first long note wavers and I let it. It hurts in a clean way, the way something hurts when it is finally allowed to. My voice finds the next line and the next and then it catches on the high part, the part Yelena always held longest, and it cracks there and I do not stop. I sing to the end.
I stop.
I do not look at him. I look at the window. The garden is darker.
I can hear his breathing from where I’m sitting.
Slow and hard, like a man holding himself very still.
His hands are in my peripheral vision, flat on the black fabric of his pants.
Halfway through the verse the right one has begun to shake.
His jaw is locked. He has not made a sound.
He has not crossed into the room. He is still at the threshold.
I look at him for the first time.
The cut at his eyebrow is closed, the skin still bruised at the edges. The tape at his ribs shows at the open collar of his shirt, white against the olive skin.
The skin under his eyes has gone gray and his mouth is set in a line it has held for days.
His eyes find mine and they are the ones that live underneath everything else he shows the room, the ones I saw the moment he turned the canvas around, and I have done that to him and I know it and I came down anyway.
Heat moves low in my belly. My pulse climbs into my throat. He is hurt and exhausted and his hand is still shaking and I still want him so badly it makes me furious and I do not look away.
He does not move. His voice comes out rough and low and it lands in my chest the same way the first note of the song did.
“Mila.”
He has said my name many times. Not like that. Not like it costs him something to get it out.
“I have not been able to hear that song since Moscow. Since Yelena.” A breath. His jaw works once. “I have left rooms when it came on. Changed stations. Told Nonna to turn off the radio.” He looks at me. “I sat through every note just now and my hands were shaking and I did not want to leave.”
His voice drops.
“You did that.”
My chest aches with it, the anger and the want and the grief all sitting in the same place, and I do not look away from his face.
“I know,” I say. “I felt it.”
I look at the knife on the table. I reach over and close it and slide it toward the lamp, away from where my hand has been resting. He has not moved but his breath changes and I catch it from across the room, the slight pull of it, like something in him is holding very carefully still.
I lift my right hand from the arm of the chair.
His left hand has come to rest on the arm of the chair across from me.
He crossed the distance between us without me noticing he moved, and he is close enough now that I can see the tape under his shirt where his ribs are still healing, and something in me wants to press my palm there, just to feel that he is real and here and did not die in that corridor, and I hate that I want that, and I want it anyway.
I put my hand on top of his. Light. The pads of my fingers on the back of his hand.
His breath goes audible. A muscle in his forearm pulls tight under my fingers, the tendons going taut, and his pulse at his wrist is fast against my fingers and I am wet and I am angry and his hand is warm under mine.
He does not move at first.
Then he turns his palm up. Slow. He does not move his arm.
He just rotates his hand, and my fingers slide off the back of his hand and into his palm, and he laces our fingers together, his between mine, mine between his, and my throat closes because this is the most deliberate thing anyone has done to me in years, this slow turn of a palm, this asking without asking, and I cannot speak.
I am still angry. I am not letting go.
I say it quietly. Not looking at him. Looking at the window.
“I’m still angry.”
He doesn’t let go. He doesn’t speak for a moment.
“I know. You should be.” A pause. “I found out who you were and I told myself I was protecting you. That was a lie. I was protecting myself. From having to tell you. From watching you leave.”
His thumb moves across my knuckle once. Slow.
“I will not keep anything from you again. Not one thing. You have my word.”
His hand stays open under mine. He is not gripping. He is not holding me there. I could take my hand back and he would let me.
“I know that’s not enough tonight. I’m not asking for tonight.”
My throat is tight. I look at the window a long time before I look back at him.
“I know you weren’t trying to hurt me.” My voice comes out rougher than I want it to. “That almost makes it worse.”
He doesn’t say anything. He holds my hand open in his and he does not try to fix it, he does not fill the silence, and that is the thing about him I have never been able to walk away from, that he knows how to stay inside something broken.
The garden goes the rest of the way dark. The lamp on the desk is the only light. The cicadas through the cracked window go to their late pitch, the full summer sound, and the pulse at his wrist slows under my fingers.
Maria comes to the doorway. She is in her apron. She looks at us and withdraws without a sound.
I keep my fingers laced through his and he does not move. He does not speak. He does not take. The next thing is mine. He has always known that.
When I stand, his fingers do not tighten. I let my hand slide out of his. His palm stays on the arm of the chair, open, empty, and I look at it for one second before I look away.
His voice is quiet and even.
“Take whatever time you need. I’ll be here. Same door open.” A beat. “You don’t owe me anything, Mila. Not a word. Not a look. Not forgiveness. Nothing. I’ll be here anyway.”
I walk to the doorway. He has not stood. He is still in the chair with his palm open on the wood where my hand was.
I do not turn back.
I walk out through the corridor and up the stairs and into my room and close the door behind me and do not lock it. The lamp off. The window cracked the way I have left it every night since the first week.
My right hand is still warm where his fingers were laced through mine. I press my palm flat against my cheek and hold it there in the dark, and the warmth of it moves through me slowly, like the first note of a song you thought you had forgotten.
I close my eyes.
I sleep all the way through the night for the first time in days.