Chapter 5
Nica: margaret he wired the advance
Margaret: how much
Nica: i’m not saying it out loud
Margaret: Veronica.
Nica: it’s more than i make in a year. TWICE.
The advance hit her account six hours after Demetri walked out of the building.
Nica was standing at the sink in the WMS break room, waiting for the coffee, when her phone buzzed with the deposit notification.
She read the number. Then she read it again.
Then she set the phone face-down on the counter and stood very still with both hands on the edge of the sink, looking at the wall — the water-stained drop-ceiling tile, the fridge that hummed too loud, the passive-aggressive note about labeling your own food, the whole small ordinary room where she’d eaten a thousand sad desk lunches.
After a moment she picked the phone back up and read the number a third time.
More than twice what she made in a year.
More money than she had ever seen in one place with her name attached to it.
She went into the single-stall bathroom off the break room, locked the door, sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, and cried for four minutes, silently, both hands pressed over her mouth so no one in the hallway would hear, the fluorescent tube buzzing overhead and the tissue-thin walls carrying every footstep past the door.
She had never had more than a few hundred dollars to her name after rent. Not once. Not in twenty-nine years.
She washed her face, blotted it dry with paper towels, walked back to the break room, poured her coffee, and carried it to her workstation.
She sat across from the book — safe in its cradle, waiting for her — and pressed her palms flat to the table and breathed.
One contract. Six to nine months. Do the work.
Do it well. Go home. She told herself that until it almost felt true.
Margaret found her staring into space.
“The relocation team arrives at the loading dock at six tomorrow morning,” she said, in the brisk tone she used when she’d made a decision and was presenting it as fact. “You’re expected at the estate by noon, and Mr. Vasiliev is sending a car to your place at nine.”
“Yes. A car.” I am living in a fairy tale. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. At least, not to her.
Margaret set an open folder in front of her — the consulting agreement, already signed on Demetri’s side, the signature line waiting for Nica. “I had legal review the terms, Veronica. They’re — the terms are extraordinarily generous. The bonus structure alone —”
“I read it.”
Margaret blinked.
“He had a copy couriered to me hours ago. I read the whole thing.” Nica looked at her hands, then up. “I kept waiting for the catch. There isn’t a catch, Margaret.”
“No,” Margaret said carefully. “There doesn’t appear to be.”
They looked at each other across the workstation. “I already signed it. Online.” The admission would have made her feel foolish, if she hadn’t just watched that deposit arrive. Billionaires, it seemed, operated on a different level entirely.
“Go home early,” Margaret said. “Pack. Get some sleep.” She paused at the door. “Veronica — I’m here if you need me. Just call. This is an amazing opportunity, and we’ll still be here when you’re finished.”
Nica nodded.
She took the N-Judah home to the Outer Sunset, the car rocking through the tunnel under Duboce Park and out into the gray afternoon with the usual jolt, the wheels shrieking on the curve and the window fogging with the breath of thirty tired commuters.
She stood in the aisle with one hand on the overhead bar, the pole cold and slightly tacky under her palm, and thought about what to pack.
Two suitcases, if she was careful — one for work clothes, the good blouses and the single blazer that still fit; one for everything that made her apartment hers instead of a furnished room she was temporarily occupying, which was how she’d thought about every place she’d lived since she was fourteen.
The Saint Basil icon from the Richmond flea market that Baba Yelena would have scolded her for buying — a reproduction, Veronika, you have the eye of your grandfather and the budget of a fool — but that she’d bought anyway, because it had made her feel, for half an hour on a Sunday, like she was not entirely alone.
The two photographs. Her grandmother’s pendant.
The pendant.
She put her hand to her collarbone, and there it was under the collar of her coat, the wrist so fine she sometimes forgot she was wearing it.
A small enamel medallion, oval, not much larger than her thumbnail, in Romanov-era colors — cobalt and cream and a fine line of old gold at the border.
It was warm from her skin, the way it always was, the one small heat she carried against her sternum all day.
She’d never been able to identify the tiny figure on its face, though she’d looked at enough Fabergé-adjacent work in three years at WMS to know whoever made it had been working at a level on par with the imperial workshops.
Baba Yelena had given it to her the last Christmas before she died.
She’d sat on the edge of Nica’s bed and pressed it into her palm and closed her fingers around it and said, in Russian, in the old formal mode, This belonged to my grandmother, and to hers before that.
It is the only thing I have from the old country.
Now it is the only thing you have from me.
Do not lose it, Veronika. It is all that is left of where we come from.
Nica had not lost it. She’d worn it every day for fourteen years — even the days she hadn’t eaten properly, even the days she’d considered selling everything she owned that could be sold.
It was not for selling. It was the whole of her family in a single oval of enamel and old gold, and she pressed her thumb to it now through her coat, the way she did a dozen times a day without noticing, the way another person might touch a scar.
She took the trash out at six-thirty — one bag, the detritus of living alone: coffee grounds, last Tuesday’s groceries, a broken umbrella she’d been meaning to deal with since March.
She carried it down and around to the alley where the bins were, the fog already thick and cold against her face, beading on her lashes, carrying the flat mineral smell of the ocean two blocks west. The Outer Sunset was doing what it always did in the early evening — going gray and still, the fog rolling in off the water, the Vietnamese place on the corner putting out its sidewalk menu in a wash of lemongrass and hot oil, the man at the bodega on Forty-Fifth giving his awning crank the three turns it always needed, the metal ratcheting loud in the muffled quiet.
Ordinary. The neighborhood she’d lived in for three years, in a studio above a surf shop, in a city she’d never left and never had reason to.
She lifted the bin lid, dropped the bag in, straightened, and looked down the street. The alley opened onto Forty-Fifth. From where she stood she could see the block both ways, the streetlights coming on early in the fog, hazed to soft orange globes, the parked cars slick with dew.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and a chill raced through her that had nothing to do with the fog.
Something moved. A shape. Not a person, not anything she could name — more like a density in the fog across the street, a pressure in the air, the sense of being regarded that prickles between the shoulder blades before the mind knows why.
She stared for a long moment, frozen, one hand still on the lid, her breath held.
Then the fog moved, a car turned onto the block, its headlights swept the street — and there was nothing across from her.
A parked Honda. A bike locked to a pole. A fire hydrant. Nobody.
Nerves, she told herself. You’re leaving your apartment tomorrow for a stranger’s house, and you’re seeing things.
She went back inside. An hour later both suitcases were packed and breakfast was waiting in the fridge for the morning.
She washed her few dishes, wiped down the surfaces, and stood in the middle of the studio, looking at the small, spare life she’d lived until now: the narrow bed, the bookshelf with gaps where the Russian volumes had come out like missing teeth, the one rusted hook by the door.
No one will even notice I’m gone. Sad, but true.
Or not entirely true — one person would.
Margaret would notice by noon if she didn’t show up, though Margaret wouldn’t be looking for six to nine months.
If she was being generous, the barista at Trouble Coffee on Noriega might notice a regular had stopped coming in; he liked to flirt.
Then again, within a day he’d have replaced her order in his memory with the next person’s.
Her landlord would come knocking if the first of the month arrived with no rent. That was the whole list. Three people.
She’d lived in this city her entire life — school here, work here, these trains, these avenues, these restaurants — and she could vanish, and almost no one would know she’d ever existed.
It’s sad and depressing and entirely my own fault, because I don’t much like people.
She’d always known this. Made her peace with it long ago, across a string of foster placements and social worker offices and community college lines where no one knew her last name until she said it.
Books are better than people anyway. She’d told herself that same lie more than once, and as she stood there sipping hot tea, the mug warming her cold hands, she still chose to believe it.
Her life sat in two suitcases by the front door, and she felt the aloneness settle over her the way the fog settled over the avenues, soft and total and familiar, one hand on the edge of the sink, looking at the yellow streetlight through the window above it.