Chapter 21
ELENA
The ceiling in the guest suite is higher than the one in my bedroom in Queens.
I have spent a significant portion of my first night as Roman Petrov’s wife lying on my back looking at it.
Not anxious exactly, just awake, the way you are awake in a space that doesn’t know you yet, where every small sound is unfamiliar and the quality of the dark is different, and your body can’t quite settle into rest because some part of it is still taking inventory.
The sheets are expensive. I noticed this at some point around two in the morning when I had run out of ceiling to look at and turned onto my side. The kind of expensive that doesn’t announce itself, just sits there, quietly superior to every other sheet you have ever slept on.
The pillow is the same. The mattress is the same. Everything in this room is the best version of itself, and none of it is mine, and I lay down in the middle of it and listened to the city sixty-two floors down and reminded myself that I chose this.
I did choose this.
I choose it again in the morning when I wake up, find my way to the kitchen, and stand in front of a coffee machine with more settings than my first car, and spend four minutes figuring out how to make it produce something drinkable.
Roman is already gone.
I know this not because he told me his schedule last night, but because I have been managing his schedule for two years, and I know that he’s in the office by seven thirty on Saturdays when there is council business pending, and there is always council business pending.
His cup is in the drying rack beside the sink, rinsed and upturned, and the kitchen is clean and quiet and smells faintly of his coffee and his cologne.
I stand at the counter with my own cup and I look at the city through the kitchen window and I think, with the clarity of a Saturday morning, that my life looks nothing like it did a week ago.
I set up at the long dining table with my laptop and my phone and the forwarded correspondence that has been accumulating since yesterday afternoon, and I work the way I always work, methodically and without interruption, because Roman’s professional life does not pause for his personal one, and by extension, neither does mine.
It is strange to do this here after two years of sitting outside his office door.
I draft three responses to correspondence that came in overnight, flag two items for Roman’s attention, confirm a Tuesday meeting with a note that his wife will be managing his schedule remotely until further notice, and then I stop and look at what I just typed.
His wife.
I close that email and open the next one.
The man arrives at eleven.
He is one of Roman’s, I know this the moment the door staff calls up to announce him, and he comes through the penthouse entrance. He is carrying a sealed envelope that needs to go directly to Roman, and since Roman is not here, he is apparently going to leave it with me.
He’s maybe forty, broad, with the kind of face that has seen things and stopped being surprised by them, and he looks at me when I open the door with an expression that moves from expectation to something else in the space of half a second.
“I’m here for Mr. Petrov,” he says.
“He’s not in. I can take that for him.”
He looks at me. Then he looks past me into the penthouse, a slow, deliberate look that takes in the laptop on the dining table, the coffee cup, and my lack of shoes, and he looks back at me.
“I’ll come back,” he says.
“I’m his wife,” I say. “I can take the envelope.”
He holds the envelope out without a word, and I take it, and he looks at me one more time, the same look, unhurried and assessing, and then he turns and goes back to the elevator.
I close the door.
I stand in the entrance hall with the envelope in my hand and I look at the middle distance and I breathe slowly through my nose.
I remind myself that I have stood in rooms full of Roman Petrov’s associates for two years and I have never once given any of them the satisfaction of seeing anything on my face that I didn’t put there deliberately.
I put the envelope on the table next to my laptop.
I go back to work.
I make it forty minutes before I pick up my phone and call Mara. She answers on the second ring, her voice that of someone who has been waiting for this call.
“Tell me everything,” she says.
So I do. I tell her about the coffee machine and the ceiling and the sheets and the dining table and working in my silk blouse with no shoes.
I tell her about the lobby downstairs with the men who look at everyone who comes through the door like they are already running a calculation about them.
I tell her about the envelope man, the look he gave me, and the way he said I’ll come back, like I was a piece of furniture he had not been informed would be there.
“He sounds like a nightmare,” Mara says.
“He was perfectly polite.”
“The politely dismissive ones are the worst kind.”
“I know.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him I was Roman’s wife and took the envelope.”
A pause. Then Mara makes a deep, satisfied sound. “Good. Did you say it as you meant it?”
“I said it like it was a fact.”
“That’s better than meaning it.” She pauses again. “Do you mean it?”
I look at the envelope on the table. The plain gold ring on my left hand. The city outside the window is doing its Saturday thing, indifferent and enormous, not remotely interested in what I mean or do not mean.
“I signed the papers,” I say.
“Elena.”
“I’m figuring it out, Mara.”
She lets that sit for a moment. Then she says, “Tell me about the sheets.”
And I laugh. Properly, the way I have not laughed in weeks.
I tell her about the sheets, the pillow, the mattress, and the coffee machine with its seventeen settings.
She listens and adds commentary in exactly the right places, and for ten minutes, the penthouse feels less like a space that doesn’t know me yet and more like just a place I’m talking to my best friend from.
When we hang up, I’m still smiling.
Roman comes home at seven.
I hear the elevator before I hear him, the soft mechanism of it arriving at the floor, and then the door and his footsteps crossing the entrance, and then he appears in the doorway of the main room where I am sitting on the sofa with my laptop and the remains of the dinner the kitchen staff left for me on the coffee table.
He looks at the table. At me. At the laptop.
“The Harmon follow-up,” I say. “They want a call on Monday morning. I’ve put it in your calendar for nine.”
He takes his jacket off and drapes it over the arm of the nearest chair and comes to sit at the other end of the sofa and reaches for the folder I’ve left on the cushion between us, the day’s flagged correspondence.
He opens it and begins reading and I go back to my laptop and we sit like that for an hour, the city outside the windows and the lamp on between us and the quiet of two people who have learned to work in the same space.
At some point, he sets the folder down and says, without looking up from whatever he has moved on to reading, “A man came by this morning.”
“Petyr,” I say. “He left an envelope. It’s on the table.”
Roman looks at me then. “What did he say to you?”
I meet his gaze. “Nothing worth repeating.”
He holds it for a moment. Something moves in his jaw, brief and controlled, and then he looks back at his reading and says nothing else, and I look back at my laptop, and we do not discuss it further.
We do not need to.
I’m in bed at eleven with the lamp on and a book I’ve been reading the same page of for twenty minutes when there’s a knock at the door.
Not tentative. Two knocks, even and unhurried, the way Roman does everything.
I close the book.
“Come in,” I say.
The door opens.
He’s in dark trousers and a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he stands in the doorway and looks at me in the bed with the lamp on. Neither of us says anything for a moment, and neither of us pretends that what is happening right now is about anything practical.
He has not come to check if I need anything.
I have not been waiting for him to come because I needed anything.
We both know this.
He steps into the room and closes the door behind him, and I set the book on the nightstand, and the lamp throws its warm light across the room, and outside the windows, the city glitters sixty-two floors below, and neither of us says a single word.