27. Grisha
GRISHA
Three days in, I knew the exact geometry of my own stitches, the precise angle I could lean into a chair before four points along my ribs sent up their complaint in unison, and I had learned it the hard way, over and over, because some stubborn piece of me refused to sit still long enough to get it right the first time.
Baba Olya brought soup twice a day whether I wanted it or not, and the doctor checked the stitches every morning with the brisk efficiency of a man used to patients far more cooperative than I ever managed to be, and somewhere in all of it I noticed that Tasha had been gone before I woke, two mornings running, not sliding back in beside me until late enough that I was half asleep again, smelling like dust and someone else's coffee.
I didn't ask where. Some quiet part of me understood I hadn't yet earned the right to ask a question like that without also answering a few of my own.
The boredom had turned into something closer to anger by then, a low simmering itch under the skin that wanted movement it wasn't going to get, and when Sasha sent word that he wanted to see me in his study, I told myself it would at least be something to do besides count ceiling boards and resent my own ribs.
Sasha's study had a chair built for exactly this kind of penance, low and deep and upholstered in something that gave under a man's weight instead of fighting it, and I still managed to find the wrong angle inside the first minute.
The pull along my ribs went sharp, then settled into something duller I could work around, and I breathed through it the way I'd been breathing through everything since the garage, one careful measure at a time.
Sasha didn't say anything at first. He stood at the window with his back to me, hands in his pockets, looking out at nothing in particular, and I had known him long enough to recognize the specific weight of that silence.
It wasn't the kind that meant he hadn't decided what to say.
It was the kind that meant he had, and was giving himself one more second to say it the way he actually wanted to.
"You went in alone," he said finally, still facing the glass. "Again."
"I had a name I'd wanted for eight years and no patience left for the smart way to use it." It sounded thinner out loud than it had in my own head at the time.
"That's not an answer. It's a habit wearing an excuse.
" He turned around then, and there was nothing performed about the anger on his face, no theater in it, which made it worse than if there had been.
"You didn't call me. You didn't call anyone.
You walked into Kessler's building with no backup and no plan past the front door, and then you walked into a parking garage with a man built to kill you, and the only reason I'm not standing at your funeral this week is that he underestimated how hard you are to finish. "
"I know how it looks."
"I don't think you do, actually, or you wouldn't have done it twice." He came away from the window and sat on the edge of his desk, close enough that I couldn't put any more distance between us than the chair already had. "That's not loyalty, Grisha. That's a man trying to die usefully."
The words landed somewhere lower than my ribs, somewhere the stitches hadn't reached, and I sat with it a moment because there wasn't a version of arguing that one that didn't sound like exactly what he'd just called it.
"I've done this since Elena," I said. "Alone. Every time it mattered, I've done it alone, and I told myself it was strength, and I told myself it was protecting the people I'd have to answer to if it went wrong, and both of those things were true enough to hide behind for eight years."
"And now?"
"I've got a woman at home who nearly buried me this week, and I still walked into that garage without telling a single person where I was going, because some part of me still believes that's what keeping people safe looks like.
" I heard my own voice go rougher than I meant it to.
"I don't know how to do it differently."
I hadn't said that sentence out loud before, not to Sasha, not to a priest, not to the mirror at four in the morning when the truth of it usually came looking for me.
Saying it in his study, in daylight, with my ribs still complaining and my oldest friend watching me like he was waiting to see if I'd actually meant it, felt like handing over something I'd kept locked for a very long time.
Sasha didn't gloat, and he didn't soften it either, which was its own kind of mercy. "Then learn," he said. "You have time to. Not everyone gets that."
"You make it sound simple."
"It isn't. I never said it was." He stood, and some of the hardness went out of his shoulders, the friend showing back up underneath the boss.
"You've spent twenty years being the man who handles things so nobody else has to.
That's why I hired you. It's also why you nearly died in a garage instead of calling for help before you needed it.
Those are the same instinct, Grigori. One of them just costs more than the other. "
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I sat with the silence instead, and for once it didn't feel like something I needed to fill.
I stayed in that chair a long while after he'd gone back to whatever the morning still owed him, my ribs throbbing in time with something that had nothing to do with the stitches, running the whole conversation back the way I used to run a manifest, looking for the one place where I could still argue myself innocent.
There wasn't one. Every road led back to the same door I'd walked through alone, the one I always walked through alone, and for the first time in eight years I let myself sit with how tired I was of being the only man standing on the other side of it.
I went looking for coffee an hour later, mostly because sitting in my own room doing nothing had started to feel worse than the ribs did, and coffee, in this house, always led through the kitchen, and the kitchen always led through Baba Olya, who took one look at me easing myself onto a stool and made a sound in the back of her throat that needed no translation.
"You are supposed to be resting," she said, not looking up from the counter, both hands buried in dough she was folding with the same unhurried rhythm she'd used on that counter for longer than I'd been alive.
"I am resting. I'm sitting down."
"Sitting is not the same as resting, and you know this, and you are doing it anyway, which tells me everything about how the conversation with Sasha went.
" She turned the dough, pressed the heel of her hand into it, flour rising in a thin cloud that settled across her apron and along the dark sleeve of her cardigan, a fine gray dust she never seemed to notice or mind.
"Sit properly, then, and tell me, or don't, and I will keep working either way. "
I told her most of it. I held back the part about the eight years, because that piece still belonged to fewer people than this kitchen, but I gave her enough.
I told her about the garage, about Sasha's chair and Sasha's window, and about the sentence I had said out loud for the first time in my life.
She didn't stop working while I talked. She never did.
The dough turned under her hands, folded, turned again, and she listened the way she always listened, with her eyes on her work instead of on me, which somehow made it easier to keep talking than if she'd been watching my face for the parts that cost me the most.
"I keep doing the same thing," I said, when I'd run out of the version I could say plainly.
"I get close enough to lose someone, and instead of letting them stand next to me while I face it, I go stand in front of them alone, because some part of me is still convinced that's the only way to keep the ones I love from becoming the ones I bury. "
"Yes," she said. "This is what men like you do."
"How do you stop? How do you let someone all the way in without spending every single day convinced you're signing their death warrant just by letting them close enough to matter?"
She stopped kneading then, just for a moment, hands still buried in the dough, flour dust settling slow in the light from the window over the sink, and she looked at me the way she used to when I was young enough to still believe she had an answer for everything.
"You don't stop believing it," she said, not unkindly. "You just decide it's worth the risk anyway."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only one there is, Grigori. I did not stop believing something could take my husband from me the day after I buried him, and I have not stopped believing it every year since, and I loved him anyway, all the way in, with both hands, because the alternative was a smaller life than the one I wanted.
" She went back to the dough, folding it under with the same patience she gave to everything that took time to become what it was meant to be.
"You do not get to love someone and keep the fear out of it.
Nobody has ever managed that trick, not once, in the whole history of people loving each other.
You only get to decide whether the fear gets to drive. "
I sat with that longer than I'd sat with anything Sasha said, because Sasha had told me what I was doing wrong and Baba Olya had just told me there was no version of doing it right that didn't still hurt.
"That's a hard way to live," I said.
"It is the only way to live that means anything.
" She wiped her hands on a towel at last, flour still ghosting pale along her forearms, and reached across the counter to press her palm briefly against the side of my face, the way she'd done since I was a boy too proud to cry in front of anyone but her.
"You did not die in that garage, Grigori.
Go find a way to be worth the risk you're asking her to keep taking on you, instead of finding new ways to almost die alone. That is the only lesson left to learn."
She went back to her dough before I could answer, which was, I was starting to understand, exactly how she always ended a conversation she considered finished.
I sat at the counter a while longer anyway, my ribs aching in their quiet, honest way, and let her answer settle where I could actually feel the weight of it instead of just hearing the words.
It wasn't the answer I'd wanted. I'd wanted a way to love Tasha without the fear that came free with it, some trick that let a man keep the people he loved close and still sleep at night believing they were safe.
There wasn't one. There had never been one, not for Baba Olya, not for Sasha, not for any man who had ever loved someone enough to be afraid of losing them.
There was only the choice in front of me now, the one Baba Olya had made decades ago with flour on her hands and a husband already in the ground, and the one I was going to have to keep making every single day for however many I had left.
Decide the risk was worth it. Let someone stand close enough to matter, and stop pretending distance was ever the same thing as protection.
I finished my coffee cold, because I'd let it sit too long thinking, and for the first time since the garage, that felt like the right kind of tired instead of the wrong kind.