Chapter 22 - Menlow
She’s gone.
I stand in the guestroom doorway, staring at the closet, and try to make sense of what I’m seeing. Her bag is missing. Her toiletries have vanished from the bathroom. The dresser drawers that held her things are bare.
She left everything I bought her. Every dress. Every piece of jewelry. Every pair of shoes. All of it is hanging untouched, like she couldn’t stand to take a single reminder of me with her.
I pull out my phone and dial her number. It rings once, twice, three times. Then it goes to voicemail.
“It’s Menlow, call me back. Please.”
I try again. Same result. When I try to check her location, she has it turned off.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m in my car, speeding toward her old apartment. Maybe she went back there. Maybe she just needed space, and she’s sitting in her old living room right now, waiting for me to come find her.
The apartment is dark when I arrive. I knock anyway. No answer. I knock harder. Still nothing.
“Kirsten!” I pound on the door with my fist. “Kirsten, open up!”
A neighbor pokes her head out from the unit next door. “She moved out weeks ago. Hasn’t been back since.”
I try her favorite coffee shop next. The bookstore she likes. The park where she goes to think. Every place I can remember her mentioning, I check. Every location I’ve ever seen on her phone’s GPS history, I visit.
Nothing. She’s vanished.
By midnight, I’m back at the apartment, pacing the living room like a caged animal. Pavel has called twice. Alexei has texted. I ignore them both. I can’t think about anything except finding her.
Where would she go? She doesn’t have family in the city. Her friends from work are acquaintances at best. She has nowhere to—
The front door opens.
I spin around, hoping against hope that she’s come back. But it’s not Kirsten standing in my doorway.
It’s Anya.
My sister crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe, looking at me like I’m the biggest idiot she’s ever met. Which, given our family, is saying something.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Cleaning up one of my brother’s messes. As usual.”
“I don’t have time for this, Anya. Kirsten is missing, and I need to—”
“She’s not missing.” Anya pushes off the doorframe and walks into the apartment. “She left.”
I go still. “You know where she is.”
“I do.”
“Tell me.”
“Not until you explain to me what the hell you were thinking.” Anya drops onto the couch and kicks her feet up on the coffee table.
“I ran into her as she was rushing out of this house. She was crying, Menlow. Kirsten. Crying. That woman has been through kidnapping and torture and car crashes without shedding a tear, and you made her cry.”
The words land like punches. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You told her to pack her bags. You set up a whole new life for her somewhere else. What did you think was going to happen?”
“I was trying to protect her!”
“By kicking her out?”
“By getting her away from me!” I drag both hands through my hair, frustration boiling over. “Don’t you understand? As long as she’s connected to me, she’s a target. The Volkovs already proved that. They used her to get to me once. They’ll do it again.”
Anya studies me for a long moment. “You’re an idiot.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” She stands and walks toward me. “You think sending her away will keep her safe? You think Jovan Volkov cares whether she’s living in your apartment or some studio across town? If they want to hurt you through her, they’ll find her. Distance doesn’t matter.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“Is it?” Anya stops right in front of me. “Or is it just easier for you to push her away than to admit you’re scared?”
I don’t answer. I can’t.
“That’s what I thought.” Anya sighs and pulls a piece of paper from her pocket. “She’s staying at the Starway Hotel. Room 412. I paid for a week so she’d have time to figure things out.”
I take the paper with trembling fingers. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Anya heads for the door. “She’s furious with you. And honestly? She has every right to be.”
The Starway Hotel is a modest place on the east side of town. Clean but unremarkable. The kind of place where people go when they don’t want to be found.
I take the elevator to the fourth floor and stand outside room 412 for a full minute before I can bring myself to knock.
The door opens a crack. Kirsten’s face appears in the gap. Her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy.
“Go away,” she groans.
“Kirsten, please. Let me explain.”
“You’ve explained enough.” She tries to close the door, but I stick my foot in the gap.
“Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Five minutes, and then if you still want me to leave, I’ll go.”
She glares at me through the crack. I can see her weighing her options, deciding whether to hear me out or slam the door on my foot.
Finally, she steps back and lets the door swing open.
“Five minutes.”
The room is small. A bed, a desk, a chair, and a television bolted to the wall. Her bag sits open on the bed with clothes spilling out haphazardly. She hasn’t unpacked. She hasn’t settled in. She’s just… existing.
“You found me,” she states. “Congratulations. Did Anya give me up?”
“Yes.”
“Remind me to thank her for that.”
“Don’t be angry at her. She was trying to help.”
“Help who? You or me?” Kirsten sits on the edge of the bed and crosses her arms. “Because it seems like everyone in your family is very invested in making sure I do what you want.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing about this is fair.” Her voice cracks on the last word, but she recovers quickly. “You have four minutes left. Say what you came to say.”
I take a breath. This is it. This is my chance to make her understand.
“Jovan escaped.”
Kirsten blinks. “What?”
“When we raided the storage facility, we caught Oleg. But Jovan wasn’t there. He slipped through our net.” I start pacing, unable to stand still. “We’ve been tracking him for the past two weeks, but he’s gone underground. We don’t know where he is or what he’s planning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Because I didn’t want to scare you. You were still recovering. You needed to heal without worrying about—”
“Without worrying about what? The man who orchestrated my kidnapping being on the loose?” She stands up, and anger flashes in her eyes. “You don’t get to make that decision for me, Menlow. You don’t get to decide what I can and can’t handle.”
“I know. I know that now.” I stop pacing and face her. “But at the time, all I could think about was keeping you safe. And the only way I could see to do that was to get you away from me.”
“So you set up a whole new life for me.” She laughs bitterly. “Very generous. Very completely missing the point.”
“What point?”
“I don’t want a new life, Menlow!” The words explode out of her. “I want the life I had! I want to wake up next to you and work beside you and fall asleep on the couch watching stupid movies! I want you, you absolute idiot, and you’re too busy trying to protect me to notice!”
The confession lingers in the space between us. I stare at her, stunned.
“You want me,” I repeat.
“Yes. God help me, yes.” She presses her palms against her eyes. “I know it’s stupid. I know this whole thing started as a business arrangement. But somewhere along the way, it stopped being fake for me. And I thought… I thought it had stopped being fake for you, too.”
“It did.”
She drops her hands. “Then why are you sending me away?”
“Because I’m terrified.” The admission tears out of me before I can stop it. “I have never been more scared in my entire life than when I watched them drag you out of that car. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was scream your name while they took you, and I—”
I break off, my voice cracking.
“I can’t go through that again,” I finish. “I won’t survive it. So yes, I tried to send you away. Because if you’re not near me, they can’t use you to hurt me. And if they can’t use you to hurt me, then maybe—maybe you’ll be safe.”
Kirsten stares at me for a long moment. When she speaks, her voice is softer but still edged with frustration.
“That’s the most backward logic I’ve ever heard.”
“I know.”
“You can’t protect me by pushing me away. You realize that, right? If Jovan wants to find me, he will. Whether I’m in your apartment, this hotel room, or some random city across the country. Being apart from you doesn’t make me safer. It just makes me alone.”
“I know that now.”
“Do you?” She steps closer. “Because it seems like you’re still trying to control everything. Still trying to manage every variable. Still treating me like a problem to be solved instead of a person to be with.”
“That’s not—”
“It is.” She cuts me off. “You made this decision without me, just like our entire marriage. You set up a whole new life for me without asking what I wanted. You decided that the best way to keep me safe was to remove yourself from the equation, and you never once stopped to think that maybe I’d rather face the danger with you than face a safe life without you. ”
I don’t have a response to that. She’s right. I hate that she’s right, but she is.
“I was trying to protect you.” It sounds weak even to my own ears.
“I don’t need you to protect me. I need you to trust me.
” She jabs a finger at my chest. “I survived being kidnapped. I survived being thrown in the back of a van and dragged to a warehouse and held by men who were probably going to kill me. I survived all of that, and you know what got me through it? The belief that you would come for me. That no matter what happened, you would find me.”
“I did find you.”
“Yes. You did.” Her voice breaks again. “And then, two weeks later, you tried to send me away like none of it mattered.”
“It mattered. It all mattered.”
“Then why?” She’s crying now, tears streaming down her face. “Why would you do this to me? Why would you make me feel like I was finally home somewhere, and then rip it away?”
I reach for her, but she steps back.
“Don’t.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand. “Don’t touch me right now. I’m too angry.”
“Kirsten—”
“You don’t get to show up here and say all the right things and expect everything to be okay.” She’s pacing now, with her arms wrapped around herself. “You hurt me, Menlow. You made me feel like I was disposable. Like everything we shared was just… temporary. A convenience.”
“That’s not how I see you.”
“Then how do you see me? Because right now, I have no idea. One minute you’re holding my hand in the hospital and reading to me when I can’t sleep, and the next you’re handing me a new life and telling me to pack my bags. Which one is real? Which version of you am I supposed to believe?”
“Both of them.” I step toward her, and this time she doesn’t retreat. “The man who held your hand is the same man who tried to send you away. Both of those things came from the same place.”
“Fear.”
“Yes.” I hold her gaze. “I’ve never been afraid of anything the way I’m afraid of losing you. And I handled it badly. I made the wrong choice. I see that now.”
“Seeing it and fixing it are two different things.”
“I know. But I’m trying.” I reach out again, slowly this time, and cup her face in my hands. She lets me. “I’m trying, Kirsten. I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never… I’ve never felt this way about anyone. And it scares the hell out of me.”
She searches my face for a long moment. “You still haven’t said why you really came here.”
“I came because I couldn’t stand another minute without knowing you were okay.
I came because when I walked into that bedroom and saw your things gone, I thought I was going to lose my mind.
” I brush a tear from her cheek with my thumb.
“I came because you’re not just some obligation or responsibility.
You’re everything. And I was too stupid and too scared to tell you that before I ruined it. ”
Her lip trembles. “That’s still not enough.”
“I know.”
“You can’t just show up and say pretty words and expect me to forgive you.”
“I know that, too.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
I don’t have an answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a strategy. I just have this—standing in a mediocre hotel room, holding the face of the woman I’ve wronged, hoping she’ll give me a chance to make it right.
“Whatever you need,” I tell her. “Whatever it takes. I’ll do it.”
“I need time.”
“Okay.”
“I need you to stop making decisions for me.”
“Okay.”
“And I need you to understand that this isn’t fixed just because you showed up.” She pulls back from my hands. “I’m still angry. I’m still hurt. And I don’t know if I can trust you not to do this again.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” She crosses her arms again, putting distance between us. “Because we’ve been here before. You say all the right things, and then you do whatever you want anyway.”
“That’s not—”
“It is.” Her voice hardens. “And until you prove otherwise, words are just words.”
We stand there, staring at each other across the small hotel room. The distance between us feels enormous.
“So where does that leave us?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “I honestly don’t know.”