Chapter 5 Mina
MINA
I wake at five because the boys stir and then settle again, and once I’m awake I stay that way.
The apartment is quiet. The heat ticks. I run a finger along the thin line on my jaw.
A morning ritual of sorts, I guess. I shower, dress, and step into the kitchen where my mother is already at the stove warming bottles.
“Morning,” she says without turning.
“Morning.” I check the formula level, rinse, wipe, move in the narrow space we share without bumping her. She hands me Yuri first. He gulps like the world is late. Xander is patient and then not. Their eyes track my face. Three months old, all appetite and sound.
“You’ll be late?” my mother asks.
“Usual time.” I pack my lunch and then unpack it because there won’t be time to eat it. I pack it again anyway. Habit helps when courage feels thin.
I don’t know what Vitaly’s up to, and it’s ruining my sleep. Hers too.
We have a system for mornings, and it gets us through the chaos of it all. On my way out, I kiss the boys’ warm heads and my mother’s cheek. “Text me if you need anything.”
“I always do,” she says. “Be safe.” She looks at my face for a beat. She doesn’t say his name. She doesn’t need to remind me to watch my back.
The stairwell smells like dust and someone’s toast. I keep my keys in my fist, aimed down.
People always tell you to put your keys between your fingers like Wolverine claws.
But funny enough, it was Vitaly who broke me of the habit.
“You do that, and the keys will hurt you more than your attacker.” He positioned my keys in my hand like I was holding a dagger.
“That’s better. You have more control that way—always keep them pointed down, and it’s harder for someone to use them against you. ”
Never thought I’d be using his advice against him.
At the front door I scan the block through the glass without looking like I’m scanning. No black jacket at the corner. No motorcycle. A delivery truck idles half a block down. A woman pulls a toddler by the hand. The street is just a street. I step out and walk.
I take the earlier train to avoid the crowd I know too well and switch cars at the last minute.
I stand with my back to a wall and keep my bag in front.
It looks like normal city habits. It’s also what I can control.
At my transfer I go up one staircase and down another.
I am not running. I am not hiding. I am making it harder to follow me without being seen.
Fear sits in my throat. I swallow it and keep moving.
Work is the same beige it was yesterday.
I like that. The lobby guard nods. I say his name.
I take the elevator with a woman from HR who’s always cheerful before nine and quiet after.
She compliments my cardigan. I thank her.
I sit at my desk and open my inbox. It fills as if I’m feeding it, little fires I can stamp out without asking permission.
Between tasks I check the glass of the front doors. Vigilance can look like boredom if you do it right. At ten I change the toner in the west copier because no one else will admit they know how. At ten thirty I fix a typo in the header of a motion that would have made us look sloppy.
At eleven I text my mother: All good?
She sends a photo of Xander asleep with one hand flung over his head. Yuri awake and scowling at the camera.
All good, she writes. Eat lunch.
Lunch is my job today. Twelve people in a conference room want sandwiches and one wants soup and one wants to be difficult. I read the list twice. I grab my coat and head for the deli two blocks down because their line moves and their rolls don’t crumble.
The sidewalk is busy. I don’t want to look for him.
I tell myself not to. I do anyway. A man in a black jacket crosses at the light.
He’s the wrong height. Too many black jackets out here, and knowing Vitaly, he’d be in a different color today to throw me off.
I walk fast enough to look like a person who’s late and slow enough to scan the glass of storefronts as I pass.
The deli is bright and loud. The chalkboard lists specials that are never special.
I order fast, pay, and stand to the side as the counter guys stack paper-wrapped rectangles into bags.
A fly drones at the window. A toddler smears a hand on the glass.
I look up to kill a second, and I see him on the sidewalk.
Vitaly stands across the street, face angled away from me, but I know the line of his jaw.
He wears a cap low. He pretends to look at shoes in a window.
He keeps his body at an angle that would photograph well.
It always did. He is exactly where he can watch the deli door and also where he can turn and vanish if I move toward him.
My body answers before my mind does. My throat tightens. My fingers go cold. I do what the nurse taught me after the clinic when she saw my face and didn’t say anything, just told me to breathe through the nose and out through the mouth until the pulse lets go.
“Order for Kerr,” someone calls. I move. I do not look at the window again. I stack bags. I thank the man at the register. I step out into the sun and turn left without pausing. Vitaly stays where he is like a shadow you try to step on. I don’t look at him. I walk.
At the first corner I join a group crossing and then I cut through a lobby I know has a back exit to a different street.
I don’t run. My heart does. The door is heavy.
I push through and join a line of office workers who don’t know they are my cover.
The sandwich bags are heavy, but I hardly feel it.
I keep my face neutral. I don’t look back until I’m under our awning.
When I finally glance over my shoulder, he isn’t there.
He could be anywhere. I go inside and badge in with a hand that wants to shake.
“Hero,” says the junior associate when he sees the food.
He has no idea. I pass out lunch and keep one for myself even though I can’t taste anything right now.
I take two bites because my mother told me to eat.
I drink water. The day moves like it always does, a straight line of tasks that keep others from falling apart.
All afternoon I think about the deli window and the angle of his shoulders.
I think about the way he smiled when he wanted something and how it looked exactly the same when he was about to hurt me.
Look at the clock. Count to ten. Answer an email about misplaced exhibits and I find the exhibits and I put them where they need to go.
Check the front doors again at three. All of it automatic pilot, because I’m not here right now.
My body is, but my mind is a million miles away.
By five the floor starts to empty, and the silence makes me itch.
I text Mom to let her know I’m heading home, and I change flats for sneakers. The train platform is a wall of coats. He could be any of them.
I choose the car with the most light. I stand near the door but not at it.
Every man is a problem for the first two seconds and a stranger after that.
I get off one stop earlier than usual and ride the bus for three blocks because that’s what I planned.
It slows me down. It also means no one can pace me from the station to my apartment without being obvious.
The block looks normal when I turn onto it. The bodega owner has the door propped open. Two kids argue about a scooter. A woman drags a trash can to the curb. I let my shoulders drop a little. In the lobby I check the mailbox I already checked this morning, like I always do.
“Hi, Ms. Harbor,” says the super when he passes me on the stairs.
“Evening.”
At the apartment door I listen. Inside, my mother is singing under her breath.
It’s the song she used to sing when I was small and scared of storms. I unlock the deadbolt.
I lock it again behind me. A deadbolt won’t stop Vitaly, but the inconvenience will annoy him. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
My mother looks up from the floor where she sits with the boys. “Good?”
“Good enough.” I’m not lying. I’m home. The bad thing didn’t happen today. That counts.
We feed them together. Xander kicks and laughs milk at me.
Yuri concentrates like eating is work. These boys are the reason I’m still breathing.
After my catastrophic breakup with Vitaly, I needed a reason to keep going, and they gave it to me.
They mean everything to me, and I will do anything to keep them safe.
Even if that means facing the man of my nightmares.
Mom and I talk about nothing. The pediatrician called. Shots next week. The formula brand downsized but the price didn’t go down. My mother saw the neighbor’s cat on the fire escape and thought it was a raccoon. She’s tired. The usual. Neither of us say his name.
There is a knock at the door.
It’s a simple sound. It empties me. My mother’s eyes snap to mine. We don’t speak. She lifts Yuri and I lift Xander and we put both boys back in the playpen. My mother wipes her hands on a towel. I wipe mine on my jeans. We stand still for a second like the floor might tell us what to do.
The door is wood and old. The chain is thin.
The lock is a lock but not a shield. If it is him, the door is not the thing that will keep him out.
I know that. I also know that if it is him and I don’t open the door, he will go around me.
There are two babies in this room with my eyes and a little of his father’s chin. I can’t let him in.
If I can talk to him, maybe I can keep his attention on me long enough to think. Maybe I can bargain. Maybe I can remind him of something human. Maybe none of that will work.
There’s only one way to find out.
“Stay back,” I tell my mother. She nods and moves to the side, phone in one hand, butcher’s knife in the other.
I go to the door and put my eye to the peephole. It’s too dark to see anything but a shape. I take a breath to steady myself. “Who is it?”
A beat. And then, a low growl. “Roman Ekimov.”
I stop breathing.
I look at my mother and shake my head so she doesn’t call or stab anyone yet.
I open the door just enough to see him. He fills the hallway without moving.
He looks exactly as he did the night he pressed a button and made the world smaller.
Controlled, eyes on mine and nowhere else.
He takes in my face, my hands, the apartment behind me, the sound of the boys, and he doesn’t flinch.
“What are you—”
“I know the twins are mine.”
The room tilts in a way that isn’t physical. Everything in me tries to split at once, and every word in my head eddies away.