Chapter 22 - Anton
She’ll come home. She has to.
That’s what I tell myself, pulling on my jacket in the grey half-light of yet another morning that has no Darya in it.
No coffee prepared the way she takes it.
No sections of the newspaper are divided with that particular efficiency she deploys even for small things, as if disorder in any form is a personal affront to her refined sensibilities.
There is no rousing click-clack of her high-heels on the hardwood floor, the gait of which I’ve apparently memorized, that follows me into my yearnful dreams, and the awful replays of the living nightmare where I told her to walk away from me and she fucking listened.
She’ll come home, I tell myself, and I’ll explain.
That’s all I have to do; I have to put a hand over my heart, and I have to tell her the truth.
I have to admit to her what I know, and have been afraid for her to know too.
I’ve rehearsed a hundred times—a thousand times—version after version of an explanation, delivered clearly and without the kind of emotional catastrophizing that had apparently seized me in that office and rendered me useless to her when she needed me not to be.
I’ll lay it all out for her.
I’ll lay myself fucking bare.
She’s a logical woman. The most logical woman I’ve ever encountered, in fact.
She’ll understand me. Whether I’ve deserved it or not, she’s the one who’s seen me.
Who has taken the time to memorize me. She’ll see the shape of it, the why of it, even if she doesn’t forgive it immediately, because that’s who she is.
She processes, assesses, and dissects with the eye of a restorer.
She earns her livelihood, drawing conclusions from evidence rather than feeling.
She’ll understand.
I’m almost certain she’ll understand.
She has to.
***
This mole—and I use the term as a placeholder, because I’m no longer certain it’s one fucking person doing this much goddamn damage—is a ghost.
I’ve run blind tests through four separate channels, each one isolated and traceable; if the information surfaces anywhere, it shouldn’t.
So far, nothing has surfaced. Either the mole is laying low—spooked by the witch-hunt he or she must know is underway, as was always an acknowledged risk when we picked the strategy—or he’s more patient than I’ve given him credit for, or, and this is the possibility that sits worst with me, he’s inside a circle I haven’t thought to test yet.
A circle that’s close enough that it would be impugning something sacrosanct to level an accusation at it.
The kind that, if it turns out to be true, will require me to do something I won’t enjoy doing. And won’t that just be my fucking luck at this point.
One night, I returned home with nothing at all.
Just when I think that’s the lesser evil, I come home the next night with worse than nothing: a brigadier I’d considered a candidate who I’ve had to clear, not for being a mole but for buckling under the pressure and confessing to sampling the drug stock en route to New York, which means I have to start over on that particular thread and I have to reorganize the crew under him.
This is hardly the time to be promoting one of these fuckheads, let alone hiring someone external to take over when everything is in dire straits.
The night after that, I feel the need to sit in my car in the driveway for the better part of an hour, so I can pretend I’ll go inside and Darya will be there. Just to have something to look forward to.
This isn’t productive. I know it isn’t productive or healthy.
But Darya’s absence has a texture to it that’s different from any absence I’ve experienced in this house, and I’m finding that I can’t quite prepare myself for it in the four minutes it takes to walk from the garage to the front door. So, pathetically idling it is.
It isn’t much of a comfort either that Anastasia is in the hallway when I do go in, coming from the direction of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand. She takes one look at me and looks, almost comically, like she’s trying to swallow her tongue. I appreciate the restraint.
Well, I appreciate it right up until she says, “She’s not going to just come back, you know.”
“I know,” I say.
“Do you?”
All I can do is sigh and not walk up to the roof just to leap from it. That would be too theatrical, even for me.
***
I’ve been telling myself, with the conviction of a man who has made a career out of being right, that Darya will arrive at the logical conclusion.
That she’ll weigh it up—the marriage, the alliance, the baby, the life we’ve been quietly building inside this manor without either of us naming it as such—and she’ll see that the sensible next step is to come home and have the conversation.
Surely, after everything, she knows I’m not a man who meant to wound her. I adore her. She has to know that.
But here’s the problem with that reasoning, and it takes me an embarrassingly long time to locate it: Darya isn’t making a logical decision.
She’s sitting with a wound. And a wound doesn’t respond to logic.
A wound responds to the person who caused it, showing up and being willing to bleed a little themselves.
I know this.
Of course, I know this.
I’m just—I’ll admit it, to no one but myself and the ceiling of this office—I’m stalling.
Because explaining means opening the door to the room I keep shut, and letting her see what’s behind it, and whatever Darya does with that information will be entirely out of my control.
There is no strategy for it. No contingency.
No position of strength from which to deliver it.
There is only the truth, undefended.
I find that, for a man who prides himself on control, the prospect is roughly equivalent to being asked to walk into a gunfight without a weapon.
She’ll come home, I tell myself again.
And again, and again.
Even I can hear, by now, how hollow it’s getting.
***
I’m in the dining room, which is a departure from my recent habit of sequestering myself in the office.
I’m there because I’ve been in the office for the better part of a week, and the walls have started to feel like they’re making a point.
I’m sitting at the head of the empty table with a bowl of something I’ve been eating without tasting, a stack of documents beside me that I’ve been reading without absorbing, when my mother saunters in.
She doesn’t say anything at first. She takes her usual seat, which feels pointed, given that it’s at the other end of a table that currently has no one between us. She pours herself a glass of water from the carafe. She looks at the documents, then at the barely touched bowl, then at my face.
Then she reaches across and smacks the back of my head.
It isn’t hard enough to hurt. It’s hard enough to be unambiguous.
“Mama—”
“Quiet,” she scolds crisply, setting her glass down. “I’ve been very patient with you, Anton, and now enough is enough.”
“You’ve been—” I splutter, woundedly rubbing the back of my head. “Stasi told you.”
“Yes, of course, Anastasia told me,” she confirms, without a shred of remorse on her behalf or Stasi’s.
“She was right to. Somebody had to, since you clearly weren’t going to.
She shouldn’t have been the one to have to.
You should have come to me days ago. How could you not?
And for that matter, how could you let Darya go in the first place? ”
I open my mouth.
She looks at me.
I close it.
“She said—” I try again.
“I don’t care what she said.” My mother’s voice is composed, unhurried, the voice of a woman who has made this particular point before and is prepared to make it as many times as necessary.
“Whatever she said, Anton. I don’t care.
A woman doesn’t leave because she said something.
A woman leaves because she needed something and didn’t get it.
Those are two entirely different problems, and the second one is yours to fix, my darling. ”
“It’s more complicated than—”
“It is never as complicated as you make it.” She says this the way she says most things: as fact, as settled, as a matter she’s already thought through thoroughly and found wanting of any counter-argument.
“No woman, no matter how composed, no matter how capable, no matter how infuriatingly self-sufficient—” and here, something almost fond crosses her face, which startles me enough to stop talking “—doesn’t want to be chosen.
Fought for. Loved in a way that requires something from the person doing the loving.
That’s all it ever is, Anton. That’s the whole of it. ”
I look at the table. The grain of the wood. I count it before I can stop myself, and then I stop, deliberately, which takes more effort than it should.
“Get your head out of your ass,” my mother says pleasantly. “It’s a beautiful head. It deserves better than where you’ve put it.”
Despite everything, a tectonic plate in my chest shifts, searching for a better place to fit itself. And my mother sees it. Of course, she sees it. She’s been reading my face since I had one.
She doesn’t leave. She sits and watches me grapple with how far I’ve fallen.
How much I’ve fucked up. She refills her glass and then mine, and she settles in with the composure of a woman who has more to say and has decided she’s going to say it.
I recognize the posture. I’ve been on the receiving end of it my whole life.
There’s no way to brace myself for this hit.
It’s worse than the thump on the back of my head.
“Do you know what it was like,” she says, “watching you with Irina?”
I don’t like to think about that time. But neither does my mother. I know that. I can see that she aches to talk about it now. If there had been anyone as heartbroken as I’d been over the loss of Irina, it was my mother.
It’s why I don’t stop her—why it doesn’t even occur to me to.