40. Taylor
TAYLOR
Seven months later, I am thirty-seven weeks pregnant and awake at two in the morning because I need pancakes.
Not tomorrow morning. Not after the sun comes up.
I try to ignore the craving and go back to sleep, but it doesn’t work.
The baby in my body is screaming at me that they need pancakes.
Tears wobble in my eyes. I try to calm myself.
This is ridiculous, Taylor. Nothing’s wrong.
It’s just a craving. But I feel a hot tear spill over and down my cheek.
Mikhail is asleep beside me on his back, one arm beneath his head and the other resting across my waist. For a man who controls nearly every waking movement around him, he sleeps with offensive calm.
I try to stay quiet, crushing my face into the pillow, but beside me Mikhail wakes anyway. “What is wrong?” The question is sharp enough to summon armed men through the walls.
“Nothing,” I sniff. “I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”
He studies my face as though I may be concealing internal bleeding. “Are you ill? In pain? Bleeding?”
“Oh my God, no. I just need, I mean—I want pancakes.”
Mikhail stares at me. “Pancakes.”
“Yes.” The way he’s looking at me makes me feel ridiculous, and I almost dissolve into tears again, but I don’t. I shake my head. “It’s okay, it’s just hormones. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
He looks toward the clock and reaches for his phone. I catch his wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Getting you pancakes.”
“It is almost three in the morning.”
“I can read the clock.”
I stare at him, my forehead wrinkled and my mouth twisted. “Are you planning on sending your terrifying security team on a midnight grocery run? They’re going to hate me.”
“They will survive. They need something to do.” Mikhail settles his palm against the enormous curve of my stomach. The baby shifts beneath it, pressing something hard enough into my ribs that I wince. “You are carrying my child. You should have anything you want.”
The words are sincere. That is the problem with Mikhail. His excesses are rarely performance. He genuinely believes three armed men searching Moscow for pancakes is a proportionate response to my hunger.
“Mikhail,” I say softly, letting go of his wrist and sliding my hand down to hold his, his phone in both of our hands.
For a moment, I expect him to pull free and make the call anyway. It is what he does. He identifies a problem, decides on a solution, and considers anyone else’s opinion an administrative inconvenience.
Instead, he pulls away to put the phone back on his side table. “All right,” he says.
I stare at him.
“What?”
“You listened to me.”
“I listen to you frequently.”
“You hear me frequently. That’s different.”
His mouth tightens. I have apparently offended him with accuracy.
He pushes back the covers and gets out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
“To make pancakes.”
I roll onto my side, push myself upright with considerably less grace than I once possessed, and stare at him. “You know how?”
He looks over his shoulder. “Taylor, I am a grown man.”
He holds out his hand. I take it.
The kitchen is dark when we enter, but Mikhail doesn’t turn on the overhead lights.
He switches on the lamps beneath the cabinets instead, filling the room with a low amber glow.
He rolls up his sleeves and rifles through cabinets, taking out a large bowl first. He locates flour, sugar, eggs, and milk.
I settle onto a stool at the island and watch. He doesn’t measure anything. When he cracks an egg into a bowl with one hand and doesn’t even have to fish shells out, something stirs low in my stomach. Pregnancy has made me even more humiliatingly attracted to him.
Mikhail pours batter into the pan. The first pancake is too dark.
When I point at it, he says sharply, “Do not.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
The second is better.
We sit at the kitchen table with a plate between us. I pour too much syrup over mine. Mikhail watches.
“What?”
“That amount is unnecessary.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“That is not a universal defense.”
“It is currently my favorite one.”
I take a bite. It’s warm, pillowy, and exactly what I wanted. My eyes close. Mikhail’s posture relaxes as if he has personally prevented a crisis.
“Good?” he asks.
“Very.”
He takes one for himself.
For several minutes, the house is quiet except for forks against plates. It could almost be ordinary. A man cooking for a woman he loves. A baby neither of them planned. A kitchen lit warmly after midnight.
Domestic bliss.
“So, you can play piano, you can make pancakes. What else can you do?”
He looks at me with a prideful expression. “I do not know that I have much else hidden, but I can cook. A man who cannot feed himself is only a well-dressed child.”
“That sounds like something Nikita would say.”
Nikita appears in the doorway wearing a robe and an expression of suspicion. “That is because I did.”
She sits beside me. Mikhail places a pancake on her plate without asking. She accepts it as her due.
The three of us remain there long after the pancakes should have been finished.
Another batch appears. Tea replaces coffee.
Nikita wanders away once, returns, complains that we have ruined her sleep, and then remains at the table anyway.
Outside the windows, black slowly gives way to charcoal gray.
Eventually she disappears upstairs again and returns carrying a small parcel wrapped in tissue.
“What is that?” Mikhail asks.
“Not for you.”
She hands it to me. Inside is a folded baby blanket. The wool is soft but worn thin in places, pale blue with a darker border stitched around the edges.
I run my thumb over it. “It was his,” Nikita says.
I look at Mikhail.
“You kept this?” he asks her, his voice gruff in a way that sounds like it may be guarding tears.
Nikita gives him an impatient look. “Of course I kept it. He was wrapped in it when I brought him home,” she tells me. “He screamed for three months.”
“I did not.”
“You did. You had colic.”
“Maybe you did something—”
“Careful what you say,” she says. “I think some of these men might still be loyal to me.” She gestures with her fork to the guards.
I laugh and hold the blanket against my chest. I kiss Nikita’s cheek and look at Mikhail happily, waving his blanket like a flag won.
“Would your family ever live here?” he asks.
“In Russia?”
“Yes.”
“My parents don’t speak Russian.”
“They could learn.”
“My father complains when restaurants change their menus. I don’t know how he would handle changing continents.”
“He would have his restaurant. Maybe you could all be happy here and not just… stuck here.”
Normally, I would accuse him of planning my family’s relocation before I’ve agreed to anything. Instead, I picture my mother drinking tea with Nikita. My father fighting with Mikhail over the correct way to cook something. The two of them seeing that I am safe.
Or safe enough.
The image brings an unexpected ache of happiness.
When I look up, Mikhail sees it. His expression is so open that I know exactly what he’s thinking about—a future with me.
His mother sitting beside me. The remnants of pancakes between us.
His old blanket in my arms and his child inside me.
How can I be angry that he wants to plan that, with or without me?
“Yeah, maybe.”
By the time my phone vibrates on the table, pale morning light has filled the kitchen. I glance toward the clock. It is almost seven. The name on the screen pulls me back to the present. Anya. I pick it up.
Petyr told me someone from university saw you at a market and you were pregnant. Is it true?
I stare at the message. Across the table, Mikhail’s phone begins to ring. He glances at the screen. “Olga,” he says.
Something in his tone makes Nikita look up.
There is nothing strange about Olga attending the hospital opening later this morning.
Half the senior regional government will be there.
It’s one of Mikhail’s public victories, the kind of event that gathers ministers, donors, doctors, cameras, and anyone who wants to be photographed near him. He answers. “Yes?”
I type beneath the table.
Yes, it’s true.
Anya’s reply comes almost immediately.
Taylor, are you sure you’re okay? Do you know what he really is?
Mikhail leans back in his chair, listening. “No,” he says. “The hospital event is proceeding as planned.” The man who made pancakes is disappearing beneath the politician again.
I look back at my phone. I owe Anya the truth. I owe her a closed door.
I’m safe. I know all the things he is, and I know safe isn’t one of them. I’ve made my choice.
Across from me, Mikhail’s expression sharpens. “Why do you need the contractor list?” Nikita’s attention moves fully to him.
I read Anya’s next text.
Are you coming back for your things?
So she understands that I’m not coming back. Maybe she understood before I did. I look around the kitchen. At the ridiculous collection of food covering the counters. At the cooling pancakes. At Mikhail’s old baby blanket folded across my lap.
Keep them. Give away anything you don’t want. Mikhail can replace it.
I almost laugh after sending it. It’s something the old me would never have said.
But the old me did not know what it felt like to have armed guards search Moscow for American breakfast food at midnight.
She had never watched a dangerous man stand barefoot at a stove making pancakes because she asked for them. She had never carried his child.
Mikhail rises from the table. “You may have the public list,” he says. “Not the private contractors.” There’s a pause. He turns away from us, phone pressed to his ear. “No. You do not need the security route.”
That is stranger. Olga has every reason to stand beside him at a podium this morning. She has no reason to know how he will enter the building.
Nikita’s expression is blank, but she’s focused. Three dots appear beneath Anya’s name. Disappear. Then return.
Just be careful, Taylor.
Mikhail says, “Why are you asking whether Orlov will attend?” The name pulls my attention away from the screen. He listens. His face becomes unreadable. “Who told you he was unavailable?”
Another pause.
I send Anya a heart. It feels inadequate after a year of friendship, shared rent, bad meals, complaints about professors, and whispered conversations after midnight. But anything longer would turn goodbye into negotiation.
I put the phone face down on the table. Mikhail continues, “You can meet with me at the hospital before the press conference.” His eyes narrow. “No. Not here.”
He ends the call. The kitchen is silent. “What did she want?” I ask.
Mikhail sets the phone on the table. “More than she is entitled to.”
His gaze moves to me. I glance down at my phone. Anya has not written again. “What did she want?” he asks.
“To know whether I was coming back for my things.”
“And are you?”
“No.”
Relief crosses his face before he conceals it.
His phone lights up again and he ignores it.
“Is something wrong?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. Nikita makes a quiet sound of disbelief. Mikhail ignores her. “Olga is ambitious. She likes to know which direction power is moving before anyone else does.”
It sounds like an explanation. It also sounds like something he’s telling himself. I fold his baby blanket carefully and set it on the table. A few minutes ago, Mikhail was imagining my family living beneath this roof. Now he’s studying a public event as if it might be a battlefield.
The hospital opening is supposed to celebrate his reforms later this morning. Doctors, donors, politicians, cameras. A clean public victory. Olga is supposed to be one more minister smiling for photographs.
But I’ve begun to understand Mikhail well enough to recognize the moment he senses a threat. His world has shifted around us again. And he still won’t let me in.
I touch my stomach and feel the pressing of little feet there. I’m not letting him fully in either, but I don’t know that that makes me feel better.