Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
Natasha
Dr. Elena Markov's office is on Michigan Avenue, twelve floors up, with a waiting room that smells of lavender and the curated calm that medical spaces deploy when they know they are receiving people at their most unguarded.
Victoria drove me here. She is in the waiting room now with a magazine she is not reading.
I deal with things alone. This is documented and consistent and has served me functionally for the better part of thirty-five years.
Victoria has parked herself in that waiting room with the quiet immovability of a woman who is growing her own child and has decided that the appropriate response to her best friend's solitude is to be adjacent to it - not inside it, but present and absolutely not going anywhere.
I did not tell her not to come. This is the most I have been able to offer.
Dr. Markov is Russian-American, fifty-one years old according to the clinic's website, and the variety of no-nonsense I find tolerable precisely because it does not perform warmth but simply has it - the way load-bearing walls have their function without announcing it.
She reviewed my file before I arrived. She asks her questions in the direct sequence of an efficient intake protocol and does not treat the situation as either catastrophe or occasion.
I appreciate this more than I can locate the language for.
The clinical portion proceeds without incident.
I answer everything accurately. I maintain my standard composure through the blood pressure reading and the medical history and the due date calculation, which she delivers with matter-of-fact precision.
The due date lands in my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.
Late July.
Then the ultrasound.
Dr. Markov guides the transducer and watches the screen with practiced focus. I watch the ceiling because looking at the screen directly feels like a commitment I have not fully ratified yet.
"There it is," she says.
I look.
“Oh, that’s a healthy heartbeat,” she cooed. “Can you hear it?”
I could. The heartbeat is audible enough to steal my breath - a small, rapid flutter, rhythmic and entirely indifferent to the complexity of the situation it is generating.
Simply beating with the cheerful biological insistence of something that has decided to exist and sees no reason to consult anyone about it.
Dr. Markov turns up the audio and the room fills with it. A fast, steady rhythm. Strong. Completely certain of itself. And something happens in my chest that I have no clinical name for and no scheduled slot to manage. My jaw tightens. Pressure builds behind my eyes.
I look at the screen and I think: you are very small.
My chest expands unnaturally and I find myself leaning toward the screen, suddenly eager to see more. To feel more. Dr. Markov produces a tissue from somewhere without commentary and sets it at the edge of the examination table within reach.
"It's okay to feel this," she says.
I take the tissue. I use it once. I fold it. I set it down.
"The heartbeat is strong," she continues, returning to the clinical, which I appreciate because the clinical is a room I know how to be in.
"You are approximately seven weeks. Everything presents normally.
" She prints the image — a small black-and-white printout — and hands it to me. I hold it with both hands.
The flutter, frozen in still image. A comma-shaped fact.
I look at it for a long moment and I think: you are going to be so inconvenient.
I think it with something that feels, structurally, almost exactly like love.
Victoria stands up when I come through the waiting room door. She reads my face and says nothing and falls into step beside me. We walk to the car in the November cold with our shoulders almost touching and the printed image inside my coat against my chest.
"Well?" she says, when we are inside with the heat running.
"Strong heartbeat," I say. "Due date is late July."
She is quiet for a moment. Then she reaches over and squeezes my hand twice - the wordless language of our particular friendship - and I squeeze back and stare at the windshield while the city does its indifferent midmorning thing outside the glass.
"I found something in the archives," I say.
Victoria releases my hand. "Tell me."
I tell her in the car, which is efficient because it removes the option of pacing.
Three weeks ago I submitted an internal research request to Sterling-Kane's legal archive, framed as a competitive landscape review, which it partially was.
What the archive returned was considerably more than landscape.
Crawford's documentation of the Rassvet Records situation is meticulous in the way that people document things when they believe the documentation is their protection and not their indictment.
I had opened the first file expecting a litigation timeline. What I found instead was a shopping list.
Six signed artist contracts with correspondence attached - the language in the margins, in Crawford's own handwriting, noting which of Nik's roster had the most commercial potential and what terms would pull them.
IP filings coordinated in a sequence too precise to be coincidental, three in eight months, each one targeting a different pressure point in the label's operations: not designed to win but to exhaust. To drain resources and attention and the particular resilience that a young company needs in its first two years in order to survive.
The blackballing communications were the worst of it.
Two emails from Crawford to distribution contacts.
The language was careful - Crawford was always careful - but the meaning was explicit enough: Rassvet's artists were not to be picked up, their showcase tapes were not to be listened to, and anyone who stayed with the label after the IP disputes would find certain doors considerably less open than they had been.
I had sat with those emails at three in the morning until the screen blurred.
Crawford Sterling destroyed Rassvet Records not because it threatened his market share in any meaningful way.
He destroyed it because a twenty-three-year-old with resources and instincts had the temerity to build something beautiful in his territory, and Crawford's relationship to beautiful things built by other people was the relationship of a man who believes the presence of someone else's light diminishes his own.
"He did the same to you," I say to Victoria. "What he did to Nik - the architecture of it - it is the same structure he used on Sterling-Kane. Different target, identical mechanism."
Victoria is quiet. She is looking at her hands in her lap.
"We worked for him for more than eight years," she says finally. Not as an accusation. As an observation it is.
"I know," I say.
Here is the uncomfortable truth I have been sitting with since three AM when the archive documents were still open on my laptop: I was excellent at my job for a man who ran his company as an instrument of strategic demolition.
I did not know the casualties. I was not in the rooms where those decisions were made.
But I ran his numbers. I legitimized his operations with my competence.
I was so focused on the discipline of the work - on Crawford's philosophy that sentiment is a liability and numbers don't betray you - that I did not examine closely enough what the numbers were funding.
He convinced me that my emotional suppression was an asset. He convinced me of this the same way he convinced his own daughter: by finding the wound and calling it a credential.
I helped him. Not knowingly. But excellently.
This is the version of accountability that does not have clean edges.
Victoria looks at me for a long moment. Then she says: "What are you going to do with it?"
"I’m going to tell Nik," I say.
I call Nik from my office at four in the afternoon.
I do not examine the impulse at length before acting on it because examining the impulse will produce a counter-argument and the counter-argument will win and I will not make the call.
I have decided, on the basis of the ultrasound image currently in the inside pocket of my jacket, that the season for winning counter-arguments against my own instincts is over.
He picks up on the second ring.
"Natasha," he says, and the way he says it - immediate and certain, like he’s genuinely pleased but not surprised by my call - does something to the tension in my shoulders.
"I found something in the Sterling-Kane archives," I say. "Crawford's documentation of the Rassvet situation. Artist contracts. IP filings. Blackballing correspondence."
A pause. "How bad?"
"Documented and damning," I say. "The IP filings were coordinated - the timing is too precise to be coincidental.
The blackballing communications are not ambiguous.
" I pause. "I want you to know that I’ve seen it.
That I understand now what the actual record shows - not the trade press version, the internal version.
" A smaller pause. "His anger was justified. Yours was."
The silence on his end isn’t empty. It is holding something carefully.
"You didn't have to do that," he murmurs.
"I did," I insist. "I spent almost a decade running the finances of a company this man used as a weapon. I did not know the casualties but I was excellent in service of the machine that produced them." I keep my voice even. "I’m sure I don’t even know the full extent of the damage Crawford has done to people, and I can’t even begin to imagine the role I played in it, but this is my way of… I don’t know… atoning, I guess.”"
"Natasha." His voice is low and careful. "You were twenty-seven and ambitious and he found the wound and called it a strength. He did that to everyone around him. You are not his casualty list."
"I'm also not absolved by my ignorance," I say.
"No," he says. "But you're not on trial either."
We are both quiet for a moment. The undercurrent is there - the same current that ran under the Italian restaurant dinner and the elevator and every exchange we have had since Chicago, warm and steady and complicated by everything layered on top of it.
"What are you going to do with the documentation?" he asks.
"I don't know yet," I say. "I wanted you to know it exists and that I've seen it. Whatever comes next, I’ll figure it out.."
"Thank you," he says. Then, quieter: "How are you?"
The question - simple and direct and without agenda - lands in the vicinity of my sternum and stays there.
"Functional," I say.
He makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. "That's not what I asked."
"I know," I say. "It's the only response I have available right now."
He doesn’t push it.. This is a consistent quality of his - the understanding that a door left ajar is not an invitation to enter but to remain present.
He simply says, "I'll take it," and we conclude the call in the professional register we began in, with the undercurrent still running below every word like a bass note the melody is pretending not to hear.
There is a pause before he hangs up. A beat longer than necessary. Then: "Natasha."
"Yes."
"She's going to be extraordinary," he says. I hold the phone for a moment after the call ends.
He said she. I do not know why that lands the way it does. I file it in the category of things I am not examining today and go back to my spreadsheet.
That night, alone.
The cats are fed. The apartment is in its usual precise configuration. I am standing in my kitchen in socked feet and an old university sweatshirt - the Natasha no professional contact has ever met, deployed only in the complete privacy of my own square footage.
I have been standing at the kitchen counter for six minutes doing nothing. By my scheduling standards this is approaching radical.
My hand is on my stomach.
I have been catching myself doing this since the ultrasound.
The hand finding its way there without a formal request submitted, the body exercising its own unilateral logic.
I have not spoken to it yet. The baby. I am aware this is a thing people do - that Melody does, that Victoria has already started doing with her own early pregnancy, talking to the small growing fact of the person assembling itself inside them.
I have not done it because it crosses a threshold of feeling that my operating system has always flagged as structurally inadvisable.
I do it now.
Not in English. English is the language of Sterling-Kane and Harvard and Crawford's philosophy and every performance of competence I have mounted in this country since I was seventeen years old. English is the language I am good at, strategic in and defended by.
The language that arrives instead is Russian.
My father's language. My mother's humming.
The language of the apartment in Brooklyn and the taxi shifts and the Pushkin he recited to me when I was small, before the humiliation hollowed him out, when he was still the man who believed in beautiful things.
The language I have not spoken voluntarily in years because it opens a door that is not scheduled to be open.
"Я не знаю, что делаю," I say, to the kitchen, to my own hand resting on my still-flat stomach, to the small, compounding, entirely certain fact of the person who is growing inside me regardless of my feelings about the logistics.
I don't know what I'm doing.
My phone lights on the counter. A text from a Paris number I do not have saved.
Hello. I'm Katya. I know that's probably alarming.
I only have your number because Victoria gave it to me, which means she believes you won't mind.
I'm Nik's sister. I wanted to say - and I want to be clear that he doesn't know I'm doing this - that I'm glad he found you. That's all. You don't have to respond.
I look at the text for a long moment.
Then I look back at my hand on my stomach.
Then I type: He doesn't know I'm doing this either, but - thank you.
I set the phone down.
"Я не знаю, что делаю," I say again, to the kitchen.
But I think, this time, that might be alright.