Chapter 11
ELENA
Roman has been gone for eighteen days.
The office runs smoothly without him. Phones, meetings, and correspondence move through my hands, but nobody on this floor would know that I am spending approximately forty percent of my mental energy on a conversation that has been sitting unfinished in my chest since that afternoon.
Kostya passes through twice a day. He doesn’t ask me anything personal, and I don’t offer anything personal. We have a perfectly functional working relationship that we have maintained for two years on the shared understanding that neither of us is interested in the other’s inner life.
He does tell me, on Thursday, that Roman will land on Monday morning.
I say thank you, write it in the calendar, and go back to my screen.
Monday. Three days.
Carla calls on Friday evening while I am still at the office finishing a filing that cannot wait until Monday.
I see her name on the screen, and I let it ring twice before I answer because two rings is the amount of time it takes me to arrange my face into something that will not give her anything to work with.
“Elena.” My name on her lips sounds rehearsed. “Your father had another appointment yesterday.”
I put my pen down. “What did they say?”
“The same things they always say. That he needs rest and reduced stress, and that the bills will keep coming regardless of whether we feel like paying them.” A pause. “Aleksei called again this week.”
“Carla.”
“He is not going to wait forever, Elena. He has been more than patient, and you are not being reasonable.”
“I am being completely reasonable. What I am not being is available.”
“You are twenty-three years old, and you’re sitting in an office managing someone else’s life while your father’s situation gets worse every month, and Aleksei Morozov is offering to make all of it disappear. I don’t understand what you’re waiting for.”
I look at the window. The city outside is doing its Friday evening thing, all that light and movement, indifferent and relentless.
“I’ll call you this weekend,” I say.
“Elena—”
“I’ll call you this weekend, Carla.”
I hang up before she can say his name again.
I sit at my desk for a moment with my hand still on the phone and the filing in front of me and the city outside and the arithmetic of my life adding itself up the way it keeps adding itself up, no matter how many times I try to carry the numbers differently.
My father’s bills. My salary. The gap between the two is where Aleksei’s name keeps appearing like a solution to an equation I did not agree to solve.
I finish the filing and go home.
Mara is on the couch when I get in, knees pulled to her chest, a hot water bottle pressed against her stomach, her face doing the thing it does on the first day of her period, which is existing at a low level of sustained grievance with her own body.
“There’s wine,” she says, without moving. “I can’t have any. You can have all of it.”
“I’m fine.”
“There’s also chocolate. Same terms.”
I drop my bag, take my shoes off, sit on the other end of the couch, pull my knees up, and look at the television, which is playing something neither of us has chosen deliberately.
Mara shifts the hot water bottle. Winces slightly. “I hate this. Every single month, like clockwork, my body decides to remind me it exists.”
“Mm.”
“Do you ever get cramps like this, or are you one of those people I should not be friends with?”
I open my mouth to answer.
And then I stop.
It’s not a dramatic moment. There’s no music, no sharp intake of breath, no sudden clarity arriving from somewhere cinematic.
It’s just me sitting on the couch on a Friday night looking at the television while Mara adjusts her hot water bottle, and the thought arrives the way genuinely terrible thoughts arrive, quietly and without warning, and once it is there, I cannot make it not be there.
I do the math.
The masquerade was six weeks ago.
I do the math again.
Six weeks ago.
I do it a third time.
The answer does not change.
“Elena.” Mara is looking at me. “You’ve gone completely white.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. You look like someone just told you something terrible.”
“I’m just tired.” I stand up. “I’m going to bed.”
She watches me cross the room. She knows I’m not going to say anything else tonight and that pressing me will not change that. She lets me go.
“Okay,” she says. “Goodnight.”
I close my bedroom door, sit on the edge of my bed, and look at the wall.
I buy the test on my lunch break on Saturday. I don’t let myself think about it too carefully on the walk to the pharmacy because thinking about it carefully will make my legs stop working, and I can’t afford for my legs to stop working on a public street in broad daylight.
I buy two, because one feels like optimism I can’t afford, and I walk to the coffee shop three blocks from the office out of some instinct I can’t explain, the way you return to a place that feels known when everything else feels the opposite.
The bathroom is single occupancy. I lock the door.
I follow the instructions with focused concentration, then set the test on the edge of the sink, look at my own face in the mirror, and wait.
Two minutes.
I do not look at the test for the first minute.
I look at my own reflection, and I think about the filing I finished last night and the calendar entry that says Roman lands Monday morning.
Even Carla’s voice on the phone saying he is not going to wait forever, and I think about my father in his chair by the window, looking more tired every time I visit.
I think about a masquerade ball six weeks ago, an emerald dress, an ivory mask, and a man who held me like I was something worth taking time over.
I look at the test.
There are two pink lines.
I sit on the closed lid of the toilet, place the test on the floor in front of me, look at it, and don’t move for a long time.
The coffee shop makes noise on the other side of the door.
Someone knocks once, lightly, and then goes away.
A chair scrapes across the floor. The espresso machine runs through its cycle.
The world continues with complete indifference to the two pink lines on the floor of this bathroom, and I sit with my hands pressed flat on my thighs and I breathe, in and out, until the first wave of something passes and the second wave comes and passes too and what is left underneath both of them is just the plain, cold arithmetic of my situation.
I am pregnant.
Roman Petrov is the father.
Roman Petrov lands on Monday morning.
I pick up my phone, and I call Mara.
She picks up on the second ring. “Hey, did you want me to—”
“I need you to come.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I’m at the coffee shop on 54th. Can you come now?”
A beat. Just one. “I’m already getting my coat,” she says.
We sit on a bench in the park two blocks away because I need air and Mara needs to see my face, and the bench gives us both.
She hasn’t said anything since I told her, which is the most useful thing she has ever done for me. She’s just sitting beside me with her shoulder pressed against mine and her coffee going cold in her hands.
“Okay,” she says finally. Quietly. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking that I cannot have this baby and keep this job.”
“Those are not necessarily the only two options.”
“They are for me.” I look at the park. A woman is walking a dog in the middle distance, the dog stopping every few feet to investigate something important.
“He’s my employer, Mara. He is twenty-eight years older than me.
He runs an organization that I understand just enough about to know that this is not a situation that ends cleanly for anyone. ”
“Does he know? About the masquerade.”
I close my eyes briefly. “Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since before he left.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “And you were going to tell me this when?”
“I’m telling you now.”
She shifts on the bench to look at me properly. “Elena.”
“I know.”
“What are you going to do?”
I look at the woman with the dog. She has given up trying to move it along and is just standing there waiting, patient and unhurried, while the dog takes its time with whatever it has found.
“I’m going to go home,” I say. “And I’m going to write my resignation letter. And on Monday, when he lands, I am going to put it on his desk before he has a chance to finish whatever conversation he thinks we are going to have.”
Mara looks at me for a long moment. “And the baby?”
“One thing at a time.”
She doesn’t push. She puts her arm through mine, and we sit on the bench until the cold makes it unreasonable, and then we walk home, and she makes tea, and she doesn’t ask me anything else.
The resignation letter takes me four drafts.
The first one is too apologetic. The second one explains too much. The third one is one sentence and says nothing.
The fourth one is two paragraphs, professional and clean, with no reason given beyond personal circumstances.
I read it twice, save it, and close my laptop.