13. Make it livable. （Aleksander）
MAKE IT LIVABLE. (ALEKSANDER)
Mikhail opens his mouth, probably to take the blame.
“Out,” I say.
He moves before I finish the word. For once, he doesn’t argue. He sees the painting, sees Tamara beneath it, and chooses survival.
Tamara stands in the living room with both hands lifted slightly in front of her, like she’s afraid to touch anything else.
Her face has gone pale. The wine is gone from her expression, burned clean by shock.
Behind her, the Kandinsky hangs crooked. Near the lower edge, a tear cuts through the painted surface. Not large. Not catastrophic to anyone else. Still enough.
I know what to do with blood, threats, men reaching for weapons. I have no idea what to do with this.
Elena bought that painting three months before she died.
She was already thin by then. Too thin. Angry when I carried her too carefully.
Angrier when I pretended I wasn’t scared to let go of her hand.
The gallery had been private, discreet, the kind of place that didn’t put prices on walls because asking was its own disqualification.
I remember her sitting in a velvet chair with a blanket over her knees, skin almost translucent, eyes still bright with that impossible stubbornness.
“That one,” she’d said.
I’d told her it was too loud.
She’d smiled. “Exactly.”
Then she made them record the provenance as a gift from her to me, because Elena had always understood the cruelty of objects outliving people.
“You need beauty in your life, Aleks.”
I promised her I would keep it where I could see it.
I kept that promise.
Until now.
“Aleksander.”
Tamara says my name. I look at her. She swallows. “I’m sorry.”
I know she is. That’s the difficult part.
If she were careless, I would know what to do with this.
If she were cruel, if she’d done it to wound me, if she’d looked at the damage and shrugged the way people in our world shrug when something irreplaceable breaks—but she looks horrified.
She keeps checking the torn corner, then me, as if measuring the shape of what she damaged.
“I was trying to straighten it,” she says. “The bracket slipped. I grabbed for it, and it hit the marble. I didn’t—” She stops. “I didn’t know.”
No. Of course she didn’t.
That doesn’t make the tear disappear.
I step closer to the painting, not her. The damage is containable. A conservator can stabilize it, maybe repair most of it. The canvas is not ruined.
That does not help.
“I’ll fix it,” she says quickly. “I’ll find someone. I know restoration specialists. I can call—”
“Stop.”
She does.
I lift a hand toward the frame, then lower it. My fingers stop an inch short. I don’t trust myself to touch it yet.
“It was a gift,” I say. “From Elena.”
Something in her face tells me Mikhail already gave her the name.
“My wife,” I add. “My late wife.”
Tamara doesn’t move.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, but softer now. The reflex gone out of it. More grief.
I turn away from the painting.
She is still standing there in my living room, wearing the expression of someone who has accidentally stepped into a room full of bones.
“You didn’t know,” I say.
“No.” Her eyes shine, but she doesn’t cry. “But I should’ve been more careful.”
“Yes.”
The word is blunt. She absorbs it. I need her to. Not because I want her afraid—I don’t. But apology without consequence is just noise.
And this mattered.
Tamara looks around the apartment, really looks in a way I’ve seen her do with rooms. Not decorating. Reading.
“This place is hers,” she says quietly.
I say nothing.
She reads the fireplace, the bookshelves, the pale couch, the exact placement of objects no one has shifted in years. “Not obviously,” she adds. “Not in a feminine way. But it’s preserved around an absence.”
The words find the gap between ribs I didn’t know I’d left open.
I should tell her to stop. I don’t.
“You never changed anything,” she says.
“No.”
“Because you loved it?”
“Because I wasn’t ready to decide what stayed.”
Her gaze returns to mine. There’s no triumph in her face, no satisfaction at having found something true. Only a kind of careful sadness that irritates me because I don’t know what to do with it.
“That sounds exhausting,” she says.
A humorless breath leaves me. “It was easier than changing it.”
The truth sits between us. Uncomfortable. Intimate in a way I didn’t authorize.
Tamara wraps her arms around herself. The movement makes her look younger than she is. Then she straightens again, collecting herself piece by piece.
“Before, I told Mikhail that the apartment feels embalmed,” she says.
That almost gets a smile from me. “She would have liked that.”
“Elena?”
“She had a vicious eye for accurate insults.”
Tamara almost smiles. “Then I’m sorry I didn’t meet her.”
I wasn’t ready for that either.
I look back at the painting. The tear is still there. Small. Ugly. Real.
“I don’t know how to live in a room once it stops being a memorial.” I don’t mean to say it.
Tamara doesn’t move. Then, quietly, “I do.”
She inhales once, steadying herself. “That’s my job. Taking spaces people have outgrown and figuring out what can remain. What has to change. What still matters.”
The words should sound like a pitch. They don’t. They sound like an offering.
I wasn’t expecting that. I don’t know what I was expecting.
“You’re an interior designer.”
Her brow lifts faintly. “That has been established.”
The words arrive before I decide to say them.
“Fix it.”
She glances toward the painting.
“I don’t mean the Kandinsky,” I say. “Not only that.”
She understands before I explain. “The apartment?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to erase her,” Tamara says.
“You won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you understand what the painting was.”
She looks away then. The first tear slips down her cheek, and she wipes it away, almost angrily.
“I damaged something irreplaceable.”
“Yes.”
“I hate that.”
“I know.”
She believes me.
Not forgiveness. Not yet. But the absence of accusation.
“I’ll call restorers in the morning. The best ones I know. And I’ll make a plan for the apartment. Not to replace her. Not to replace anything.” Her voice firms slightly. “To make it livable.”
Livable.
I have owned this penthouse for years and somehow never considered the word.
Slept here. Worked here. Bled here. Detoxed here. Survived here.
I don’t know that I’ve lived here since Elena.
My attention moves to the painting again. The tear is still there. Asking her to touch the apartment should feel impossible. Instead, it feels like the only thing in the room that might move.
“All right,” I say.
Tamara nods once. Then she looks at the tear again.
“I really am sorry.”
“I know.”
This time, I let the words mean more.
I step past her toward the study because I need distance before the room asks more from me than I can give. At the doorway, I stop.
“Tamara.”
She turns.
“If you need to move something again, call me.”
For one second, shock crosses her face. Then something almost like laughter breaks through the grief.
“Very fair.”
I leave before I answer.
In the study, I close the door but don’t sit. The room is dark except for the city glow and the faint light from Tamara’s workstation. Her material samples are still spread across one side of my desk. Linen. Stone. Wood. Warm neutral things that don’t belong here yet.
Or maybe they do.
My phone waits beside them. Messages. Threats. Business. I ignore all of it.
Instead, I open the lower drawer and take out the photograph I haven’t looked at in months. Elena in the gallery chair, blanket over her knees, smiling beside the Kandinsky as if she had just won an argument.
She had. She usually did.
I set the photo on the desk and look at her face for a long time.
Tamara did not break it because she didn’t care. She broke it because she was unsettled, trapped, reaching for something she could fix.
I understand that better than I want to.
If I’m not careful, this marriage will keep making her reach for things she was never meant to carry.
I look at Elena’s photograph one more time. Then close the drawer.
Outside, Tamara is still moving through the apartment. Quieter now. More careful.
Not peaceful.
But no longer untouched.