23. Cora
CORA
A week had passed since the lunch with Basile that Dmitri still refused to describe as anything more dramatic than fine, and he had announced, out of nowhere, that we were disappearing for a weekend, no phones, no folders, no clients, which from a man who treated silence like a personality trait counted as an actual vacation itinerary.
The signal bar on my phone dropped to nothing somewhere around the second turn off the county road, and I watched it happen the way you'd watch a countdown, one bar, then none, then just a small SOS icon mocking me from the corner of the screen like a dare.
I held the phone up toward the windshield anyway, some old reflex insisting there had to be a better angle for it, a magic spot in the passenger seat where the universe still let me check my email.
"It won't work," Dmitri said, not even glancing over. "I already tried that angle in the spring."
"You've timed the exact spot where cell service fails on this specific road?"
"I've had this house fifteen years. You learn things."
I set the phone face down in the cupholder, and something about the gesture, small and deliberate, felt bigger than it should have for a woman putting down a piece of glass and metal.
Twenty-six years of always being reachable, since middle school, through every college final and three straight years of wedding season, and here I was, willingly driving toward a house with no bars and, apparently, strong opinions about pancakes I hadn't heard yet.
"You look nervous," he said.
"I look like a woman who hasn't gone twelve consecutive hours without checking a screen since the Obama administration, possibly either one."
"You'll survive."
"I know I'll survive. I'm just not sure who I am without a notifications badge."
He reached over without taking his eyes off the road and laced his fingers through mine, easy, like it was nothing, like we did this all the time, when really it was the first unscheduled day either of us had claimed for ourselves in longer than either of us wanted to admit out loud.
The house, when we finally pulled up the long gravel drive, was smaller than I'd pictured and better for it, wood gone silver with age, a dock leaning out over water so still it looked painted on, no other roofline visible in any direction.
No security detail idling in a black car by the tree line.
No phone charger stationed by his side of the bed like a loaded weapon.
Just water, and trees, and a man rolling his sleeves up like he had nowhere else in the world to be, because for one entire day, he didn't.
"Rule one," he said, setting our bags down inside the door. "No business. Not mine, not yours. If either of us mentions Walsh Events or the word Bratva before tomorrow, the other one gets to pick the punishment."
"That's a terrifying amount of power to hand me."
"I'm aware."
"What if I just start narrating everything in a menacing voice for fun? Does that count as business?"
"Only if you're menacing me specifically."
"No promises."
We fished for precisely as long as it took me to understand I was catastrophically bad at it, which turned out to be about forty minutes, most of them spent untangling a line I had somehow managed to wrap three times around my own wrist. Dmitri stood a few feet down the dock, calm and competent and infuriatingly patient, reeling in an actual fish within the first ten minutes while I was still arguing with a knot.
"How is this fair?" I said, holding up my wrist like evidence in a trial. "You've probably fished since you were four. I've held a rod exactly zero times before today, and now I'm basically wearing it as jewelry."
"You're doing fine."
"I am doing the opposite of fine. I am doing a hostage situation with a fishing pole."
"Here." He came up behind me, close enough that I felt the words land against my ear more than heard them, and guided my hands into a better grip, patient in a way that had nothing to do with fish and everything to do with him simply liking having a reason to stand this close to me in daylight, in public, with no reason to look over his shoulder first. "Wrist loose. Let it do the work."
"You say that like my wrist and I are currently on speaking terms."
"Cast."
I cast. The line went approximately four feet and dropped into the water with all the grace of a dead bird.
"That was better," he said, perfectly straight faced.
"You're lying to me. On our very first work free day, you're already lying."
"I'm encouraging you."
"Those are different things and you know it."
He caught two more fish over the next half hour.
I caught a stick, a very determined piece of algae, and, at one point, what I am fairly sure was my own line looping back around and hooking itself out of pure spite.
By the time we gave up and headed back toward the house, I had decided fishing was a sport invented for the sole purpose of humbling people who were used to being good at things, and I told him so, at length, the entire walk up from the dock.
"I built a company from nothing," I said. "I have negotiated with caterers who have made grown men cry. And I have just lost a fight to a stick."
"The stick had home field advantage."
"This is not the reassurance you think it is."
Breakfast for dinner had been his idea, some old habit from a childhood he didn't say much about, and I had agreed instantly, mostly because pancakes felt like exactly the kind of unserious, low stakes activity a day like this one called for.
I had not accounted for the fact that Dmitri Zolotov, a man who ran an empire with terrifying precision, apparently had extremely specific and entirely wrong opinions about pancake technique.
"You flip too early," he said, standing far too close to my elbow at his own stove, supervising like this was a hostage negotiation and not breakfast food. "Wait for the bubbles."
"I know about the bubbles. I invented the bubbles."
"You didn't wait for them."
"I waited for a reasonable amount of bubbles. You want an unreasonable amount of bubbles. There's a difference, and honestly, the fact that you don't see it concerns me a little for the future of this relationship."
"I want it cooked properly."
"It is cooked properly. It's golden. Look at it. That is a beautiful pancake, and you are standing there disrespecting it."
"It's pale on one side."
"It has character on one side."
"Cora."
"Dmitri."
We stood there, both fully committed, both absolutely aware that neither of us actually cared about pancakes even a little, and somehow that only made it funnier, the sheer, ridiculous intensity we were both bringing to a breakfast food at six in the evening, in a kitchen with no windows facing anything but trees, no phone buzzing on the counter, nobody waiting on either of us to be anything other than this particular kind of petty about batter.
"I'm flipping it," I said.
"If you flip it now, I will not be responsible for what I say next."
"Big talk from a man who once told me he'd burn down a building for me, and that felt like less of a threat than this."
"That building deserved it. This pancake does not deserve premature flipping."
I flipped it. It came apart slightly at one edge, a perfectly reasonable, mostly cosmetic casualty, and Dmitri looked at the wreckage with the wounded expression of a man watching a carefully laid plan fall apart in real time, and I laughed so hard I had to put the spatula down.
"You've seen actual violence," I said, wiping my eyes. "Real violence. And this, a slightly torn pancake, is what finally breaks you."
"This was preventable."
"Everything's preventable in hindsight. That's the whole problem with hindsight."
He didn't answer that, not with words, just reached over and stole a bite directly off the pan before it had even made it to a plate, and swore under his breath, completely unbothered by having been right, mostly because it turned out the pancake was, despite everything, delicious.
We ate on the dock as the light went orange and then pink and then a deep unbothered blue, plates balanced on our knees, my feet tucked under me against the evening cool, and for a while neither of us said anything at all, which should have felt strange and instead felt like the first settled silence either of us had shared in longer than I could remember.
"I keep waiting for my phone to go off," I admitted eventually. "Not because I need it to. Just because that's what usually happens. Something always needs handling."
"I keep waiting for mine too." He turned his glass in a slow circle, an old habit I'd noticed before, mostly when he was choosing his next words with more care than usual.
"I don't think I've had a day like this since before I inherited any of it.
Not one where nothing was expected of me by anyone. "
"Not even one?"
"There was always a call to make. A problem that couldn't wait. I told myself for years that was simply what the life required, and maybe it was. But I don't remember choosing to let a single day just be a day, not once, until right now."
"Same," I said, quieter than I meant to.
"I build entire systems so nothing can ever catch me off guard, color coded, backed up, triple checked, and somewhere in there I forgot how to just sit still and not be managing anything.
This is possibly the least productive day I've had in three years, and it might be my favorite one. "
"It's mine too."
"We should be embarrassed about how good we are at doing absolutely nothing."
"I'm not embarrassed. I'm terrified. Those feel similar right now."