Chapter 3 Mina
MINA
I wake before the babies. The quiet feels like a lie. Pipes tick. A bus sighs to a stop outside. Time to start the day.
My mother is already in the kitchen with the light on low. She pours coffee into my mug before I ask. That’s how we say good morning now—actions first, words after.
The babies rustle in their room. One small sound, then the matching one. Two heartbeats in stereo. My mother glances down the hall, then back at me. “It’s your long day. We’ll go to the park before lunch.”
“I’ll be home by six.” I try to make it true while I say it. She nods. She doesn’t tell me it’s usually seven.
I change diapers and measure formula and hand each bottle to a small fist that grips.
Xander smells like clean cotton and sleep.
Yuri yawns. When they stare at my mouth, I talk about nothing.
The weather, the bus, the way I left my sweater at work yesterday and found it on the back of my chair.
I keep it light when I’m with my boys. My mother smiles without looking away from them. A typical Wednesday morning.
I dress in the navy I keep for days with judges and partners. Flats. Hair back. Cardigan in my bag. The mirror shows a woman whose mouth tilts a little to the right now. She looks tired and focused.
I’ve never been able to lie. My face gives away my thoughts.
Our apartment is a rental that reminds me it’s temporary every hour.
Paint flakes near the shower. The kitchen window rattles when trucks hit the pothole at the corner.
We live here, but we don’t belong to it.
We used to have a house—porch, lilac bush, pencil marks on a doorframe where my father measured my height.
After he died, bills piled on the hall table until the table disappeared under them.
A bank took the rest. We carried our life down the steps in boxes and made a new one with cheaper locks.
My mother moved in with me, and we’ve been treading water since.
I kiss each baby and my mother’s hair and leave. The elevator stops on three for no one. I walk the last flight. Outside, the sky is bright and cold. The train is on time. I breathe and watch stations roll by like the names of people I will never meet.
At work, the lobby guard says good morning, and I say his name because saying people’s names matters.
I badge in. My screen wakes up to fifty-four unread emails.
I start with the ones I can kill in under a minute: confirm a reporter, push a meeting, track a courier.
Mr. Kerr wants binders redone with new tabs for a noon pitch.
The junior associate wants me to “work my magic” with the clerk—which means flirt until he gives in.
The paralegal asks for a signature page that never existed.
I line them up and do them in order. The copy room hums.
At ten I take mail to Records. The clerk stamps and sorts and always pretends not to notice my scar. I like her for that.
Back at my desk I open the Mitchell draft and start cutting the extra words lawyers use when they want to sound like they’re worth what our clients pay them.
I leave comments in calm language so no one feels corrected, only improved.
It’s a skill I earned by dating bad boys.
You can’t tell them they’re wrong about something—you have to coax them into thinking the right idea was theirs all along.
Biker gangs, doctors, mafia, Bratva, petty criminals, lawyers, they’re all the same. Big ego, tiny fortitude. And none of them can take being corrected by a woman. It’s annoying as hell.
Mr. Kerr swings by and points at the cabinet where the binders sit exactly where I left them. “Good,” he says, like I just now produced them.
The junior associate drops a file and calls it urgent. Everything is urgent to him. “Can you get us in on Friday?”
“Not without a reason, and you don’t have one. I have other work to do. Sorry.”
He tries to use his salesman smile on me, and when it doesn’t work, he utters, “Right.” He carries the file away and will call the clerk himself. She’ll tell him the same thing I did. Maybe he’ll learn. Maybe he won’t. Either way, my day moves.
Between tasks, the night I won’t think about pushes in. It isn’t the heat of it. It’s the way it shifted the floor under me. I thought I knew where home was. When I was with Vitaly, I thought I had it made. After all the other bad boys, this one was different. This one was going places.
So, I learned Russian phrases. I cooked his grandmother’s dishes.
I stood at the back of rooms and memorized who nodded to whom.
He talked about being pakhan one day, when his father was gone, like it was weather you plan around.
I thought if I knew the customs, I would be safe inside them. I was dead wrong. Almost literally.
When I think of him, I feel his knife on my jaw. I see the almost-loving look in his eyes as his men held me down while he cut me. To his mind, scarring me was proof of his love.
It was proof of his ownership. Or, so he thought.
Screwing his father was stupid of me. I know what could happen if Vitaly ever found out.
I knew it then too, and I didn’t care. I was so angry about the damn scar…
I wasn’t thinking straight. But it’s been a year since that night, and Vitaly hasn’t made himself a nuisance, so I assume he never found out.
I consider that a favor from the universe, and I’m grateful every day. If he ever found out that I slept with his father and had his father’s twins, I’d be a dead woman. And I won’t let myself think about what he’d try to do to my sons.
At noon I eat half a sandwich and text my mother.
She sends a picture of two sleeping faces and writes, Like angels when unconscious.
I laugh. No one hears me but the plant on my desk.
I work through the rest of lunch because that’s what you do when your phone isn’t ringing and your hands can stay busy. Busy is better.
The afternoon is a string of small fires.
A client shows up early and scared. I make tea and listen until she remembers her own strength.
The copier jams. I fix it. Court calls with a question.
I answer it and send the corrected exhibit by four.
Being good at things is a kind of shelter when the rest of your life feels like a storm.
At five I close my inbox and open it again because I don’t trust the quiet. I look out at the city. Glass, water, roofs, smoke. Somewhere in that mess, a man sits on a throne in a room where privacy comes at the touch of a button. I touch the edge of the scar and take my hand away.
It was a hell of a night with Roman. But it feels like a lifetime ago. Not just a year.
I leave at six, which counts as on time here.
The elevator brings me down with a handful of associates who whisper about a bill they forgot to send.
The lobby guard nods. “Night, Ms. Harbor.” Outside, the air is softer.
People loosen their shoulders on the sidewalk.
The light at the corner changes. I step off the curb with the group.
Halfway across, I feel it. Not a sound. A pressure. The sense of being looked at by a hunter. I raise my eyes, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight.
Vitaly stands on the far side behind the newspaper boxes. Black jacket. Hands in pockets. Hair cut yesterday. His attention locks on me the way it always did, like a hand closing around my throat.
I don’t stop. I don’t speed up. I pass him with two people between us and keep going, as if I didn’t see him.
He doesn’t call my name. He never has to.
I turn at the next corner with the crowd and go down to the train.
I don’t look back. If he follows, I don’t give him the pleasure of watching me check.
On the ride I stand with my back to the door and keep my bag in front. I count stations. I don’t check my phone. I take deep breaths instead, trying to look normal instead of how I really feel. Sick. Breathless in a bad way.
A woman reads. A man naps and wakes right before his stop with practiced timing. Two teens trade a pair of earbuds and make each other listen to a chorus, then swap back. The normality of it calms me and hurts at the same time.
I’m tempted to avoid going home, but he’s Vitaly Ekimov. He’s found my route, which means he knows where I live already. So I go home, because there’s nowhere else to go. Nowhere else to hide.
Home smells like soap and rice. The TV is low. Toys strewn across the rug. My mother sits with the babies and looks up only when she knows I can see her face. I wash my hands and pick both babies up and hold them until I can breathe at the pace they breathe.
“I saw him,” I say when I set them down. “Across from work. He didn’t come over. He watched me.”
My mother’s mouth goes flat. “Did he follow you?”
“I don’t think so. I went straight to the train.”
“We can go to Jo’s,” she says. “Tonight. She has the pull-out.”
“She’s too far. Work is here. The pediatrician is here. And he knows every address I’ve ever said out loud.” I keep my voice even. “If we run, he’ll smell it.”
“What do we do, then?” Her voice is careful, like she’s trying not to wake something.
“I don’t know.” The honesty scrapes, but lying to my mother helps no one, and I’m bad at it anyway.
“We change routines. I text you when I leave and when I arrive. We don’t open the door unless we’re expecting someone.
We keep the chain on. We keep the stroller and a bag by the door in case we need to go fast.”
She nods because she is practical, even when she hates the plan. She gets up and stirs a pot she doesn’t need to stir. Motion is medicine too.
My mother says they watched a dog in the park today.
We laugh in the soft way you laugh after a long day.
We clean up. Baths. Pajamas with clouds.
A board book twice because once isn’t enough.
We put them down and stand in the doorway to make sure their breathing takes the shape of sleep.
It does. The monitor glows a calm green.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” my mother says.
“Sleep in your room—”
“I’d rather be here in case that front door gets kicked in.”
I can’t argue against that.
She pulls a blanket from the closet and shakes it out. She tucks a pillow into the corner like she plans to wrestle it. She looks small and stubborn and entirely mine. I have her hair, though her reddish brown is going gray. I have her eyes too—blue with too many brown flecks in them.
The only things I got from Dad are the big feet and a taste for danger. He was an accountant by day and a motorcycle racer by night. He said it was for extra money for the family, but it was for the thrills, and we all knew it.
I set my bag by the door next to the stroller. I check the deadbolt and the chain. I check the windows even though they hate to open. My nighttime routine is the barest comfort, but I’ll take what I can get.
In bed I stare at the ceiling and let the day unspool.
Work. Trains. A man across a street. A man across a club.
I think about what I owe myself and what I owe the two small people asleep in the next room.
I make two lists in my head of things I can control and things I can’t.
The first list is short. The second tries to be a book. I close it.
I don’t know what to do next. That is the truth.
I say it out loud because secrets turn heavy when they sit inside.
Tomorrow I will get up. I will wear the forest-green dress.
I will take the train. I will do my job.
I will watch corners. I will come home. I will keep breathing until the next problem appears.
And if I see Vitaly Ekimov, I run.