36. Tasha
TASHA
Frankie's radiator had one setting, which was too loud, and one temperature, which was slightly too hot, and after three nights in this apartment I'd stopped noticing either one except in the moments right before I fell asleep, when the ticking filled up the whole apartment like something trying to get my attention.
I was noticing it now instead, lying awake in the guest room she'd finally made up properly, staring at a water stain on the ceiling shaped like nothing in particular, listening to metal expand and contract one slow click at a time.
I'd brought two folders of provenance work with me, telling myself I'd use the time productively, catch up on the backlog I'd let slide since the compound had swallowed my whole life.
I'd opened them exactly once. The condition report for a minor landscape sat three sentences deep on Frankie's kitchen table, untouched since the day I arrived, because every time I tried to focus on brushwork and canvas backing my mind wandered somewhere else entirely, some hallway with red pins on a blueprint, some man standing very still in front of a board he'd already memorized.
I gave up on sleep around midnight and wandered out to the living room, where Frankie had left a glass of wine for me on the counter hours ago that I still hadn't touched.
It had gone flat and warm and slightly embarrassing, the way abandoned wine always did, and I picked it up anyway and carried it to the window like having something in my hand might convince the rest of me I was managing this.
Brooklyn at night looked nothing like the compound.
No gate, no gravel, no perimeter lights sweeping the dark in careful, deliberate arcs.
Just streetlight and a bodega sign buzzing two floors down and the ordinary, indifferent noise of a city that had never once needed a war room.
Three days ago I would have found that comforting.
Tonight it just felt like a life I used to fit into, worn soft in all the familiar places, that I wasn't sure still had my exact shape.
"You're doing the thing where you stand at the window like a widow in a period drama," Frankie said from the hallway, and I turned to find her in an oversized sweatshirt with her hair piled on top of her head, entirely too awake for the hour.
"I heard the radiator win another round against your sleep schedule. "
"It's not the radiator."
"I know it's not the radiator." She came and took the wine glass out of my hand, made a face at the temperature, and dumped it down the sink without asking, replacing it a second later with a fresh pour she actually expected me to drink.
"You've been staring at that street for ten minutes like it owes you money.
Sit. Talk. I'm not going back to bed until you do, so really this is a gift to both of us. "
I sat. She curled into the other end of the couch with her own glass, feet tucked under her, and waited with the particular patience of someone who had known me long enough to recognize when silence needed room instead of prodding.
"Is any of this actually worth it," I said finally, the question arriving whole instead of building the way I'd expected it to, "or did I just fall in love with the most interesting research subject of my career?"
Frankie didn't laugh, which was how I knew she'd been waiting for some version of this question since the day I showed up on her doorstep with a bag and a face I hadn't managed to arrange into anything convincing.
"Say more."
"I mean exactly what it sounds like. I spent eleven years building a career out of finding the truth in old paint and older paperwork, and then one job turns into a secret cipher and a dead courier and a man who looks at me like I hung the moon.
And some part of me has to ask if I'd have fallen this hard for any of it if the mystery hadn't been this good.
" I pulled my knees up, wrapping both arms around them, making myself small in a way I used to think was a compromise until it started feeling like armor.
"What if I'm not in love with Grisha? What if I'm in love with the most fascinating case I've ever worked, and he just happened to be standing in the middle of it? "
"You're allowed to want something hard, Tasha." Frankie set her glass down on the coffee table, careful, deliberate, the way she got when she meant to be taken seriously. "That's not the same question as whether he's an idiot. Spoiler: he's also an idiot."
I laughed despite myself, a short, surprised sound that cracked something loose in my chest. "That's not helping."
"It's helping plenty, you just don't know it yet.
" She reached over and pulled one of my hands free from around my knees, holding it the way she'd held it at the door three nights ago, steady and unbothered by how cold my fingers had gotten.
"Here's what I actually think, since you asked with your face even though you didn't ask with your mouth.
I think you're not scared you fell for the wrong reason.
I think you're scared you fell for the right one, and the right one comes with a price tag you're not sure you can afford. "
"That's not fair."
"I didn't say it was fair. I said it was true, which is a different category of thing entirely, and you of all people should know the difference by now.
" She squeezed my hand once. "You didn't grow up around guns and gates and men who apologize for stitches instead of getting them looked at sooner.
I did, a little, during the summers I spent with my cousins, and I still remember exactly how long it took me to stop flinching at car doors slamming too hard.
That world doesn't get less real just because you fell in love inside it. "
"I keep thinking about the garage." I hadn't meant to say it, but once the words were loose I let them keep coming, because Frankie was the only person I'd ever managed to be fully honest with when the truth cost something.
"Not what it did to him. What it could have done.
What Kessler told Grisha, that night in his office, about how it would be such a shame if the questions outlived my curiosity.
I've read that sentence back in my head probably two hundred times since, and every time I do I understand a little more clearly that this isn't a metaphor I fell into.
It's a real world with real men who kill people over paintings, and I signed up for it the same week I fell in love, and I don't actually know if I can tell those two decisions apart anymore.
" I turned the glass in my hands, watching the wine catch what little light the streetlamp threw through the window.
"And it's not just Kessler. Say we get him, say the gala works exactly the way Hollis wants it to.
There's always going to be a next one, isn't there?
A next ledger, a next name on a wall, a next reason for some stranger in an expensive suit to look at me like a problem he hasn't gotten around to solving yet.
Is that just my life now? Guards at a gate, checking exits before I walk into a room, never once getting to relax all the way for however many years I get? "
"You don't have to be able to tell them apart.
You have to decide if you want both anyway.
" Frankie's voice had gone quieter, steadier, the register she used when she'd stopped joking on purpose.
"I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's not dangerous, because it obviously is, and I'm not going to tell you that loving him makes the danger smaller, because it doesn't, it just gives you a better reason to survive it.
But I've watched you these last few months, and I have never once seen you more alive than you've been solving a puzzle nobody else could crack while a man who adores you tried and mostly failed to keep you safe from the fallout.
That's not nothing, Tasha. That's not a research subject. That's just you."
"What if I want the puzzle and I don't want the rest of it? The guns. The compound. Baba Olya's soup and the war room and never once being able to tell my mother the whole truth about my own life."
"Then you say that, and you figure out what version of this you can actually live inside, and you stop pretending the only two options are all of it or none of it.
" She shrugged, the gesture somehow both careless and completely certain.
"Nobody's handing you a contract, Tasha.
You get to negotiate. You've built an entire career on the idea that the truth is always more complicated than the label somebody slapped on it first. Apply that here.
Stop treating your own heart like it's less trustworthy than a hundred-year-old ledger. "
I sat with that a long moment, turning the wine glass slowly without drinking from it, watching the surface catch the streetlight coming through the window behind Frankie's head.
"I miss him," I admitted, quieter than I meant to. "Which feels insane, given that I'm the one who left."
"It's not insane. It's just love with the safety catches still on.
" She smiled, small and a little sad around the edges.
"You didn't leave because you stopped wanting him.
You left because you needed to find out if you could still hear yourself think with him in the room, and from where I'm sitting, you've done nothing but think about him for three straight days, so I'm not sure the experiment's telling you what you hoped it would. "
"That obvious?"
"You've read the same sentence of that condition report every day since you got here.
I checked. It's still on the third line.
" She reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, an old, familiar gesture from a hundred late nights just like this one, only none of them had ever carried quite this much weight before.
"I love you. I'm not going to tell you what to choose.
But I don't think the question you actually need answered is whether he's worth it.
I think it's whether you're willing to be the kind of person who wants something dangerous and reaches for it anyway instead of talking herself out of it because wanting it scares her more than losing it would. "
"When did you get so wise?"
"I've always been this wise. You've just been too busy falling in love with a Russian mob boss's security chief to notice.
" She grinned at my expression, unrepentant.
"I'm allowed one joke per serious conversation.
It's in the friendship contract. You signed it in college, you just don't remember because we were both extremely drunk. "
I was still laughing, some tight, held thing in my chest finally starting to loosen for the first time in three days, when a knock landed on the apartment door, three sharp raps that stopped both of us cold and cut my next sentence off before I'd finished building it.
Frankie looked at the clock on the wall, then at me, one eyebrow rising slowly. "It's one in the morning. Nobody knocks on my door at one in the morning except my downstairs neighbor about the radiator noise, and he texts first."
I was already moving before she finished the sentence, some part of me recognizing the particular weight of that knock before the rest of me had caught up to why.
My heart was doing something complicated and fast against my ribs, and the wine glass was still in my hand, forgotten, as I crossed the small living room in four steps that felt like they belonged to someone braver than I currently was.
Frankie didn't try to stop me. She just watched, quiet for once, one hand pressed lightly to her own chest like she already knew whatever came through that door was about to answer the question we'd spent the last hour circling.
I put my hand on the door and opened it before I could talk myself into checking the peephole first.
It was Grisha.