Chapter 42
ROMAN
The delivery men leave at noon, and I tell Kostya to hold my calls for two hours.
He looks at me. I look back at him. He holds my calls.
The nursery furniture came in pieces: the cribs flat-packed, the changing table wrapped in transit blankets, a rocking chair that Elena had pointed to on a website three weeks ago by turning her screen toward me without saying anything and waiting.
I have come to understand that this is how she tells me something matters.
Not asking. Just showing me, and waiting to see what I do with it.
I ordered the rocking chair that afternoon.
Now I’m in the room that used to hold filing boxes with an assembly manual open on the floor and the pieces of the first crib spread around me.
I’m doing this myself because I have sent people to do every significant thing in my life for eleven years, and this is not something I’m sending anyone to do.
The manual is forty-two steps.
I start at step one.
By step twelve, I have established that the manual was written by someone who has never assembled furniture in their life, and by step nineteen, I have set it aside entirely and am working from the logic of the thing itself, the way the pieces fit together, the way the joints are designed to bear weight.
I have built an organization from the ground up. I can build a crib.
By step thirty, the first crib is standing against the far wall.
I look at it for a moment. White wood, simple, the slats evenly spaced, the mattress platform at the correct height. I put both hands on the rail, and I press down, and it doesn’t move, and I feel something in my chest that I do not immediately have a word for.
I start on the second one.
Kostya arrives at three with his folder and finds me on the floor, the second crib half-assembled and a screwdriver in my hand. He stands in the doorway, and he looks at the finished crib against the wall. He looks at me on the floor. He opens his folder and closes it again.
“The Ferretti situation,” I say, without looking up. “What do we have?”
He steps into the room carefully, avoiding the pieces on the floor, and sits on the windowsill.
“His organization has been watching four established networks in the northeast for the past eighteen months. Ours is one of them. They’re not moving yet.
Based on our intelligence, they’re still mapping operations, identifying leadership structures, looking for points of entry. ” He pauses. “They are patient.”
“So are we.” I tighten a bolt. “Pull everything on Ferretti. His background, his organization’s leadership, their existing operations in Europe, and their expansion pattern across the last decade. I want to understand how they think before they decide they understand how we think.”
“Already started,” he says. “I should have a preliminary profile by Friday.”
“Good.” I move to the next joint. “The council session next month. I want the Ferretti intelligence on the agenda. Not as a threat, as an item. I want the council to be aware that the vacuum left by Grigori has attracted attention and that we are already ahead of it.”
Kostya makes a note. He looks around the room. The fresh paint smell is still there, warm and faintly chemical, and there are fabric samples on the windowsill beside him, soft squares of cream and gray that he picks up and sets down without comment.
“Sunday,” I say.
He looks up. “The Ferretti—”
“Ferretti waits until Monday. Take Sunday.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Something moves across his face that he doesn’t fully manage. “Roman—”
“I said don’t,” I say.
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You were about to.”
He is quiet. He looks at the two cribs, one finished against the wall, one taking shape in my hands on the floor, and the rocking chair by the window, still wrapped in transit, one of its legs I haven’t gotten to yet. He looks at all of it for a long moment.
Then, quietly, so quietly it almost doesn’t make it across the room: “I am glad.”
I look at the crib in my hands.
“Get back to work,” I say.
He stands. He picks up his folder. At the door, he stops for exactly one second, the way he always stops, and then his footsteps move toward the elevator, and the penthouse goes quiet again.
I finish the second crib.
I unwrap the rocking chair.
I position both cribs against the far wall and the changing table beside the window and the rocking chair in the corner where the afternoon light comes through at the angle Elena will need when she is up at three in the morning.
I stand in the middle of the room and I look at what I have built and I think about a key in my hand in a lobby on 48th Street and the weight of everything it meant and the weight of everything this means and the fact that one of those weights is heavier than the other and it is not the one I spent thirty years carrying.
Elena’s birthday is in four days.
I know this because her birthday has been in my calendar since her first week of employment. For two years, I had flowers sent to the office on that date, a standing instruction handled by the billing department, something I set up once and didn’t think about again.
This year, I have been thinking about it for three weeks.
On Wednesday afternoon, I go to the jeweler on 57th Street, a place I have used before for corporate gifts.
I walk in and tell the man behind the counter what I am looking for.
He shows me several trays, and I go through them with the attention I bring to things that matter, which is different from the attention I bring to things that are merely important.
On the third tray, I find it.
A bracelet. White gold, simple, two small stones set side by side. Deep red. Ruby, the jeweler says, is the birthstone for July.
The boys are due in July.
I buy it without discussing the price, which is not something I typically do. I have it wrapped, carry it home in my jacket pocket, put it on my nightstand, and look at it for a moment before I put it back in my pocket and go to find my wife.
She’s in the kitchen in her robe, her hands wrapped around a mug, her hair loose, her bump visible even through the fabric.
She turns from the counter when she hears me, and she looks at me with the expression she has been wearing in the mornings lately.
Open. Unhurried. The expression of a woman who has stopped bracing for what a room might contain.
“The nursery people finished the second coat this morning,” she says. “It smells incredible.”
“It will air out by the weekend.”
She sips her tea. I cross to the counter and stand beside her, and we look at the city through the kitchen window.
After a moment, she leans against my arm, a small automatic thing she has started doing somewhere in the last few months, and I let her lean, and I don’t comment on it because commenting on it would make it a thing, and it’s better as what it is.
“Your birthday is in four days,” I say.
She looks up at me. “You don’t have to—”
I take the box from my pocket and set it on the counter in front of her.
She looks at it. She looks at me. She puts her mug down, opens the box slowly, and looks at the bracelet inside, and she doesn’t speak for a long moment.
“The stones,” she says finally.
“Ruby,” I say. “July.”
She picks it up. She holds it in her palm and turns it slightly in the kitchen light, and something moves across her face that she does not manage, does not try to manage, a woman receiving something that landed in a way she didn’t expect. Her eyes go bright. She blinks once.
She turns to me and reaches up and puts her hand against my jaw, and I turn my head and press my mouth to her palm, and I hold it there.
She laughs.
Not the version she used in my office for two years, clipped and professional and deployed at appropriate intervals.
The real one, unguarded, the one I heard through a door months ago that stopped my pen mid-sentence and has been stopping things in me ever since.
She’s laughing in my kitchen in her robe with the bracelet in her hand and her bump round under the fabric, and I pull her against my side, and she leans into me, and I think about the man I was at the beginning of all of this.
Running a masquerade for three hundred people.
Not recognizing the woman who managed every detail of it, standing ten feet away from me in a green dress.
I look at the city through the window.
I hold my wife against my side.