Chapter 42 Anna
ANNA
My father and I disagree about the Baltic routes on a Tuesday morning in October, and it’s the best conversation we’ve had in years.
He’s sitting across the conference table from me with a shipping manifest and a cup of tea that’s gone cold because he keeps forgetting to drink it when he’s making a point, which is often.
I’m sitting across from him with the financial projections my mother put together last week and a highlighter I’ve been using to mark every place where his operational instinct and her numbers don’t align.
There are a lot of highlights.
“The fuel costs make the northern route unviable in winter,” I tell him.
“The northern route has clients we’ve had for fifteen years.”
“Who are currently paying rates from eight years ago?”
He looks at the manifest and at my projections, then drinks his tea without noticing it’s cold. “We renegotiate the rates,” he says.
“Or we consolidate with the southern corridor and save thirty percent on operational costs.”
“And lose the relationships.”
“Or strengthen them by being honest about what the routes actually cost.” I push the projections across the table. “Look at page four. Mama modeled both scenarios.”
He pulls the document toward him and reads. I watch his face move through the numbers the way it always does, the small furrow between his brows that means he’s genuinely considering rather than just waiting to respond.
He’s been doing that more lately. Genuinely considering.
The warehouse and the surgery and three weeks of recovery in a room where his grandchildren brought him flowers every afternoon did something to Viktor Kestrel that thirty years of marriage and two decades of business couldn’t quite manage.
He’s slower now. More careful. Less interested in being right and more interested in getting it right.
I’ve started to like working with him.
“Page four,” he says finally. “The southern consolidation saves more in year two than I thought.”
“Mama flagged it.”
“She’s very good.”
“She’s always been very good. You just didn’t give her a spreadsheet before.”
He looks at me over the top of the document. Something in his face that I don’t quite have a name for. “I made a lot of mistakes.”
“You did.”
“I’m trying to make fewer.”
“I know, Papa.”
He goes back to the document. I go back to my projections.
Outside the conference room window, the city moves in its ordinary way, ferries crossing the harbor, cranes at the dockside, the whole visible machinery of a shipping operation that is finally, after years of bleeding, beginning to look alive.
My mother appears in the doorway at noon with sandwiches she made herself because she doesn’t trust the building’s catering, which she has described on multiple occasions as aggressively beige.
She sets the plate between us and looks at the documents spread across the table, and the cold tea and the highlighter marks running down three pages of projections.
“Are you fighting?” she asks.
“Discussing,” my father says.
“He wanted to keep the northern routes,” I tell her.
“You should keep two of them,” she says without hesitating.
“The Riga contact alone is worth the fuel cost. But consolidate the rest.” She picks up my father’s cold tea, takes it to the small kitchen off the corridor, and comes back with a fresh cup.
Sets it in front of him. “Page four is right. I ran the numbers twice.”
My father accepts the tea. “I know. She just showed me.”
My mother looks at me with an expression that says she has been waiting twenty years for someone to show Viktor Kestrel a spreadsheet he couldn’t argue with. Then she leaves us to our sandwiches.
Maxim arrives that afternoon.
He’s been in and out of the Kestrel Maritime offices for the past three weeks, helping integrate the security protocols from Luca’s operation into the company’s logistics network.
It was his idea, actually. He came to Luca after the Malikov situation and said the shipping infrastructure needed hardening and offered to oversee it himself, and watching him move through the building, talking to the operations team, reviewing the security assessments, knowing which questions to ask, I understand for the first time what Luca has been building in him all these years.
He stops at my office door on his way out.
“Southern consolidation?” he asks, looking at the map I’ve pinned to the wall with routes marked in three different colors.
“Most of it. Keeping Riga and two others.”
“Smart. The Riga client has been with this company since before you were born. That relationship is worth more than the fuel savings.”
“That’s what my father said.”
“Your father is occasionally right.” He says it without edge. Just a fact. He leans against the doorframe. “How’s he doing? Actually.”
“Better every week. He was in here for four hours this morning.”
“He shouldn’t be pushing it.”
“Try telling him that.”
Maxim almost smiles. “I’ve met him. I know better.” He looks at the map for a moment. “The twins are good?”
“Alexei finished his train track last week. The one that circles the whole estate.”
“He told me. He sent me a very detailed description via voice message. Four minutes long.”
“He takes his engineering seriously.”
“Clearly.” He straightens. “I want to host a dinner. At the estate. Proper family dinner, everyone together. Your parents, the twins, you, and Papa.” He pauses. “I want to do it right this time. Not like the last one.”
The last one. Maxim at the table, questioning the twins’ legitimacy while they cried. The night that felt like the whole arrangement might collapse under its own weight.
I look at him. At the man who spent two weeks dismantling the network that took my children, who sat on the playroom floor for forty minutes learning about track gradients, who sends voice messages to a four-year-old about train engineering.
“When?” I ask.
“Saturday. If that works.”
“I’ll check with my parents. My father might need to rest afterward, but he won’t admit that, so plan for an early evening.”
“Early evening. Done.” He nods once. “Anna.”
“Yes?”
He looks like he’s deciding how much to say. With Maxim, like his father, that pause means something. “You’re good at this,” he says. “The business. You see things my father and yours both miss because you’re not attached to how things used to be done.”
I don’t say anything.
“I’m not good at saying things like that,” he adds. “So I’m only going to say it once.”
“Once is enough,” I tell him.
He leaves.
I sit in my office for a moment after he goes and look at the map on the wall with its colored routes and its highlighted consolidations and the sticky note in my mother’s handwriting that says Riga—NON NEGOTIABLE in capital letters.
Nearly a year ago, I was being told I had to marry a stranger to save the family. Eight months ago, I walked down an aisle in a black dress and looked at a man I recognized and said nothing and told myself I was protecting my children.
I was protecting them. I know that now, without the guilt I used to wrap around it. I made the choices I could make with what I had. Some of them were right. Some of them nearly got my father killed.
But I’m here.
In an office with my name on the door of a company my grandfather built.
Working beside my father and my mother in a way none of us had managed before everything fell apart.
Going home every evening to a house where my children are growing up, knowing both their parents.
Sleeping beside a man who drove through the night and went through every room in a warehouse because he decided we were worth going through every room for.
I didn’t plan any of this.
But I built it anyway.
My phone buzzes. Luca.
Mila just informed me she has chosen the flowers for the wedding. I have been presented with a sample arrangement. It is predominantly purple. I didn’t know there were this many purple flowers.
I laugh out loud in my empty office. Type back: Tell her she has full creative control.
Three seconds.
She’s very pleased with this decision. Alexei is less pleased. He wanted trains as a centerpiece concept.
I’m still smiling when I put the phone in my bag and pick up my coat.
I turn off the office light and head home.