17. Nina
NINA
I’m the only one in the bed when I wake up.
I shower, dress, go downstairs, and avoid thinking about last night.
Sofiya is already at the breakfast table. She has Marta’s coffee in front of her, both hands around the cup, hair still loose, wearing the oversized gray sweater she has slept in since university. She looks up when I walk in and smiles at me.
Nikolai is at the head of the table. He looks up when I walk in.
Clean-shaved, jacket on, not a single thing out of place, like a man who slept eight solid hours and has no memory of what his hands were doing at midnight.
He meets my eye and picks up his coffee, and that is apparently all he has for me this morning.
I pull out the chair beside Sofiya and sit down hard enough that she glances at me.
“Morning,” I say to my sister.
“Morning.” She pushes the coffee pot toward me. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look tired,” she says again, because Sofiya has never once accepted fine as an answer in her life.
I pour my coffee. Marta comes in with bacon and sets it down.
I eat. Sofiya talks—the gallery, the Berlin collector who has been emailing her three times a week, one of her artists who apparently stapled something to a wall that was not meant to be stapled.
I listen and eat and laugh in the right places, and I don’t look at the head of the table once.
Nikolai eats his breakfast.
He doesn’t push into the conversation. He reads something on his phone for a few minutes and then puts it face down and finishes his coffee. He stands up and says, “I’ll be in my study,” to the general air of the room, and he goes.
Sofiya watches him leave.
She looks at me.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
She picks up her coffee. “I was going to say we should go out today.”
I look at her.
“Shopping,” she says. “Lunch somewhere. Just us.” She tilts her head. “You’re allowed to leave the house, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go.”
Anton pulls the car around at eleven. Two of Nikolai’s men follow in a second car, and Sofiya watches them in the side mirror as we pull through the gates and says nothing, which means she has made a decision to let it go and is finding that harder than she expected.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“I know.”
“They stay back. You won’t notice them after five minutes.”
She looks at me. “Does it bother you?”
I think about it honestly. “Less than it used to.”
She nods, and then she reaches over and turns the radio up because Sofiya has always handled difficult answers by moving past them. I lean my head back against the seat and watch the city open up around us and let myself not think about last night for a little while.
We go to three stores before lunch.
In the first one, Sofiya holds up a coat the color of burnt orange and looks at me, and I shake my head. She puts it back and picks up a different one. I take it from her hands and try it on, and she stands back and looks at me with her arms crossed.
“Yes,” she says.
“It’s expensive.”
“Nina. Buy the coat.”
I buy the coat.
In the second store, she tries on seven pairs of shoes and buys two.
I sit in the chair beside the mirror and watch her deliberate.
I’ve missed this. Not the shopping specifically, just this.
My sister. The ease of being in a room with someone who knows every version of me and does not require me to perform any of them.
“The black ones,” I say.
“I already have black.”
“You always have black, and you always wear them more than any of the other ones.”
She looks at the black ones, then at the olive-green ones. She buys both.
Over lunch, she has a glass of wine, and I have water. She tells me about the gallery show in detail.
She’s good at her work. She has always been good at her work. I tell her that, and she waves it off the way she waves off everything that matters to her.
“Alexei says the same thing,” she says.
“He’s right.”
She looks at me across the table. “Are you actually okay? Not fine. Actually okay.”
I put my water glass down. “I think so,” I say. “I’m working it out.”
“The situation is—” She stops. “I don’t have a word for it.”
“Neither do I.”
“He’s not what I expected.”
“No.”
“What did you expect?”
“Someone easier to hate.”
She laughs, short and real, then covers her mouth and looks at me over her hand, and I laugh too.
Her phone rings at two thirty.
She looks at the screen, and her expression changes. She picks up and listens and says yes twice, and then she looks at me across the table.
“I have to go,” she says. “The Berlin collector. He’s in the city, he wants to see the space tonight, and if I don’t take this meeting, I lose the sale and three months of conversations.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright. You can go,” I say.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Sure thing.”
She goes. Anton pulls around, and she hugs me on the pavement outside the restaurant, quick and tight, and gets in the car. I stand there and watch them pull away, and one of Nikolai’s men materializes at my left shoulder.
“Ready when you are, Mrs. Vasin,” he says.
I look at the street for a moment.
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s go.”
The house is quieter without her in it.
I spend the afternoon at my laptop, writing two hundred words I’m not happy with and then deleting them and starting again.
I eat dinner alone because Nikolai sends word through Marta that he has calls running late and won’t make it to the table.
I eat and read and go upstairs at nine and sit on the edge of the bed and take the day apart the way I always take days apart.
My phone rings at ten fifteen.
I don’t recognize the number immediately. Then I do. Dominique. My contact at the Tribune, the one who called me six weeks ago about the case, the one I couldn’t take because I was here.
I pick up.
“Dominique.”
“Nina.” She sounds careful. “I wanted you to hear it from me.”
I go still.
“The case broke today,” she says. “Front page. International coverage. Three outlets ran it simultaneously.” A pause. “Viktor Hale had it.”
Viktor Hale.
I know his work. I know exactly how he works, the contacts he uses, and the way he structures a sourcing chain.
I know because some of the contacts he used were mine.
I built the access he walked through. I built it over the years, and he walked through it because I was sitting in this house like a prisoner.
“Okay,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” Dominique says. “I know what that story meant. I know how long you’d been building toward it.”
“It’s fine.”
“Nina—”
“Thank you for calling.” I keep my voice level. “I mean that. Thank you.”
I hang up.
It’s been ten years, and I have never once watched my own story run under someone else’s name. Not in Warsaw. Not in Brussels. Not in Kyiv. I have been threatened, followed, and had sources pulled out from under me, and I have never lost a byline. Not until I walked into this house.
I put the phone down, and I go downstairs.
His study door is closed. I don’t knock. I push it open, and he looks up from his desk, and something in my face tells him immediately to put down whatever he’s holding.
“There was a case,” I say. “Three countries. Organized crime. The biggest story I’ve had access to in ten years.” I put my hand on the back of the chair in front of his desk. “A colleague called me six weeks ago. I came to you. I told you I needed to go. You said no.”
He looks at me steadily.
“It was published today,” I say. “Someone else ran it. My contacts. My groundwork. My decade of work in that region, and it has someone else’s name on it because I was here.”
“Nina—”
“Do you understand what a byline means?” My voice is rising, and I let it.
“It’s not vanity. It’s not ego. It’s the only currency I have.
It’s how sources decide whether to trust you, how editors decide to hire you, and how the next case finds you.
That story was going to change the trajectory of my career, and it’s gone because you said no, and you are sitting there looking at me like I’m being unreasonable. ”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to say it.”
He stands up. He comes around the desk and stops in front of me. I don’t step back.
“I made a decision about what mattered more,” he says. “I stand by it.”
“What mattered more.” I look up at him. “To you.”
He doesn’t answer, and the not answering is its own answer.
“I hate this house,” I say. It comes out quieter than everything before it.
“I know,” he says.
“I hate what you’ve done to my life.”
“I know.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to mean it.” My voice breaks on the last word, just slightly, and he sees it, and his jaw tightens.
He doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t apologize. He just stands there and absorbs all of it the way he absorbs everything, completely still, giving me nothing to push against, and the fight runs out of room.
I walk out.