44. Nina
NINA
The document is called Untitled, and it has been called Untitled since the night I created it during the lockdown because giving it a name would have made it real in a way I wasn’t ready for.
I open it on a Wednesday morning while Nikolai is in his study and the house is quiet, and the winter light is coming through the library window at the angle it comes through in the mornings, flat and honest. The document is forty-three pages.
I haven’t read it from the beginning since I wrote the first page a year ago.
I scroll to the top, and I start reading.
The first entry is dated the night I arrived.
The gate has two men on it. The second gate has two more.
The cameras run along the perimeter wall at intervals of approximately twenty meters.
The east side has a gap between the second and third post that opens for forty seconds when the guard turns for his check.
I counted it from the window three times.
I read it and I remember sitting at that window in the dark, counting seconds, building the map that was going to get me out of here.
I keep reading.
The second entry is the conversation in his study about my passport.
I wrote it down that same night, every word I could remember, his voice saying goodnight, the way the door closed without locking from the inside.
I wrote it the way I write everything that matters, precisely, nothing softened, because softening it would have meant accepting something I was not ready to accept.
He said goodnight like my name already belonged to him. I told myself it was a power move. It might have been. I filed it and went to sleep.
I stop on that line for a moment.
Filed it. I was still filing things then.
Still running the journalism brain over everything that happened, still building the case, still treating every interaction as data rather than experience.
I read that line, and I recognize the woman who wrote it, and she’s not a stranger, but she’s not entirely me anymore either.
I keep reading.
The first escape attempt. The second. The truck. I wrote the truck in the middle of the night, three pages, every word Nikolai said in Russian. What I understood and what I decided after forty minutes in the dark.
I wrote it fast, the way you write things when you’re still inside them, and reading it now, I can feel the cold of the truck bed.
He is Bratva. Pakhan for eleven years. I lay in the dark, and the picture assembled itself, and when it was complete, I lay there with it for a long time. I didn’t run. I told myself it was the story. It was not only the story.
It was not only the story.
I wrote that a year ago in the dark, and I couldn’t have told you then what the rest of it was. I can tell you now. I couldn’t have told you then because the rest of it had no name yet, and naming things requires seeing them clearly, and I was not ready to see this clearly.
I keep reading.
The function. The Russian Nikolai spoke to Petrov, reproduced from memory, every word I understood and every word I pretended not to understand.
The dinner with Lev and Peter. The way Peter set his fork down.
The night I came back to Nikolai’s room after the fight, when he reached into the drawer and held out the sachet, and neither of us explained anything about it.
I kissed him first. I have not done that before; I did it tonight. I’m not going to examine why because I already know why, and examining it will not change anything.
I sit with that line for a moment.
Then I keep reading.
The Reeves file. The file on the table in the library.
The night I read my own work reflected back at me from the wrong side of everything, and the bottom dropped out.
I wrote that one in pieces, over three nights, because I couldn’t get through it in one sitting.
Reading it now, I can see the places where the writing slows down and breaks apart at the edges, where the journalist’s precision gives way to something rawer underneath.
Two men are dead. Fyodor Larin and Pavel Sorokov.
I did not know their names before I read them in a file, and now I will not forget them.
I built the thing that killed them without knowing I was building it.
That is true. It’s also true that Reeves used me.
Both are true at once, and I have to hold both.
I close my eyes for a moment.
Then I open them, and I keep reading.
The night I dismantled the story. I wrote this one in real time, sitting at the desk while it was happening, the cursor moving between the document and the contact messages, and reading it now is like reading something written by someone who was very tired, very certain, and did not have the energy for anything that was not true.
I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. I’m also doing this because of him specifically and I’m done pretending those are two separate reasons. They are the same reason. I’m allowed to have a reason that is both.
I’m allowed to have a reason that is both.
I read that line three times.
Then I scroll to the end of the document, the last entry, written two weeks ago on a morning I don’t specifically remember but which must have been ordinary because the writing is unhurried and the handwriting, if writing on a laptop has a handwriting, is loose and easy.
He refilled my coffee this morning without looking up from the brief. The first time he refilled my coffee, I thought about it for a week. Now it just happens, and I just drink it. I think that is what it looks like when something stops being a variable and starts being a fact.
I put the cursor at the end of that paragraph, and I start writing.
I write for two hours without stopping.
I write about the truck, the Russian, and what I understood. I write the function and Petrov, and what Nikolai said loud enough for three people to hear.
I write the kitchen and the four days of silence, and the morning I came downstairs, and he was already there, and we looked at each other across the table, and something shifted.
The bathroom floor and the laugh that came out of nowhere, and him sitting on the cold tile with his back against the tub, because that was where I was.
I write it all down, every detail, every name, every moment I’ve been carrying since the church, and when I’m done, I read it back from the beginning.
It is true, all of it, every word of it is true, and it’s also not the whole truth because the whole truth is not something that fits inside a document.
The whole truth is this house and this life, and the two versions of myself that I carry around, like a before-and-after photograph I no longer need to choose between.
I scroll to the bottom of the document one final time.
I type the last line.
Both things were true at once. Both of them were always mine.
I read it back.
Then I lock the document under a password I will not write down anywhere.