15. Nina
NINA
The city moves past the window, and I watch it without seeing it.
Nikolai is beside me. Rico is in the front. Anton drives. Nobody speaks.
I heard all of it.
I’d drifted toward the group nearest them without making a decision to do it, twenty years of listening through crowds, and the Russian came through clean, and I stood there with my wine and my back to them, and I didn’t move a muscle.
Petrov was thorough. He always strikes me as the kind of man who prepares.
But that’s not what I’m sitting with right now.
Nikolai didn’t hesitate. That’s what I can’t get out from under. I’ve been in his house long enough to know how he moves, the patience of it, the way nothing leaves his mouth before he’s ready. Tonight, Petrov was still talking, and it was already over.
She’s mine.
I look out the window, and the city moves past, and I’m aware of him beside me, and I don’t look at him, and I don’t say anything, and the car is very warm.
The thing about the Reeves file is that it made sense three weeks ago in a way that is harder to access tonight.
Three weeks ago, I was a journalist in a bad situation using the tools available to me.
The wall between the two tracks was clean, and the logic held, and I could look at what I was building without it looking back at me.
It looks back at me now.
I know what Nikolai is. I have known since the truck, and I’ve been sitting on it, feeding Reeves, and telling myself the wall is still standing, technically. But walls that develop cracks do not usually announce the moment they become something you can see through.
I can see through it tonight.
The gates come up, and the car slows. I straighten in my seat, and whatever was happening in my chest for the last twenty minutes, I put away before we stop.
We get out, and Rico and Anton take the car around. We walk up the steps and inside, and the house is quiet and dark except for the lights Marta leaves on in the entrance and the hallway.
I stop.
I don’t plan to. My feet just stop moving, and Nikolai stops beside me. I turn and look at him. The hallway is dim and still, and he looks back at me like he has all the time in the world.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.
“It’s a bad habit to eavesdrop,” he says.
I look at him for another second. There’s nothing in his face that is asking for anything. He said what he said in that room, and he’s not standing here waiting for me to make something of it, or to thank him for it, or to acknowledge it in any way that costs me anything.
“Okay,” I say and go up the stairs.
In my room I change out of the dress, sit at the desk, open the laptop to weeks of reports staring back at me. I read back through everything I’ve sent.
Then I open a new message.
What I heard tonight upgraded everything I already had. I write the next report. It takes forty minutes. It’s the most complete thing I’ve sent since this started. I read it back once.
I send it.
I tell myself I have no choice.
I close the laptop and go to bed.