Roman
I know it’s her the second I read it.
I need to see you. It’s about the shooting. Don’t call.
My heart does something stupid and immediate in my chest, the kind of reaction I would mock in another man and deny in myself if anyone were foolish enough to ask. It isn’t just relief, though there’s some of that in it. It’s the fact that she reached for me at all.
I lock the screen and put the phone face down on the desk.
Across from me, Mikhail is still going through the notes from Bay Fourteen, talking about routes, names, which customs men are suddenly nervous and which ones are pretending not to be. I’ve heard enough to follow it. Not enough to care properly while that message is in my pocket.
He notices before he says anything. “You with me?”
“Yes.”
“No, you’re not.”
I lean back in the chair. “Go on.”
He closes the file instead. “That bad?”
I think about the wording again. Don’t call. That means she can’t talk freely where she is. Or won’t risk it. Probably both.
“It’s Katerina,” I say.
That gets his attention. “She texted you?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“That she needs to see me. It’s about the shooting.”
“She knows something,” Mikhail says.
“Possibly,” I say, “We won’t know till I meet her.”
“And that’s the only reason you want to see her?” he asks.
I turn to face him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I get up and go to the window because sitting still suddenly feels impossible. The city outside is gray and wet, half the afternoon already gone. Cars below, people rushing, steam lifting from the street like the whole place is trying to hide its own shape.
“Her father’s tightened the house since the shooting. More men, more rules. If she sent this, she’s already stuck.”
He nods once. “You going there?”
“No,” I say.
I look down at the phone again. I need to see her, tonight preferably.
“She needs a reason to leave her room, and then a reason to be briefly alone. Something ordinary. Something no one in that house will find worth remembering,” I say.
“Such as?”
I turn back from the window. “The chapel.”
He thinks about it, then nods again. “That could work.”
Every old house like that has one. Private enough for grief, prayer, guilt, and all the things families like the Markovs prefer to dress up as devotion. If she goes there after dinner, nobody questions it. Not at first.
I take my phone and type.
Tonight. Eleven. Private chapel. Use the side path behind the cemetery wall. Leave the children behind. I’ll be waiting on the river road. Don’t answer this unless you have to.
I read it once. Then I send it.
We wait. Five minutes pass.
Nothing.
Mikhail closes the file in front of him. “Maybe she can’t reply.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe she won’t.”
I slide the phone into my pocket. “She might be spooked.”
“That would be reasonable.”
“Yes.”
He waits.
I say, “I’m going anyway.”
That gets a look out of him.“You’re just going to wait?”
“Yes.”
“And if she doesn’t come?”
“Then she doesn’t come.”
He studies me for a second, then nods like he expected that answer before he asked.
By ten-thirty that night I’m already on the river road behind the Markov property.
Mikhail wanted two cars farther back. I let him have them, mostly because it keeps him quiet. The road is nearly empty at this hour. Wet gravel, bare trees, black water beyond them. The old chapel sits somewhere behind the wall to my left, hidden by stone and dark branches.
The side path is harder to see at night, which is exactly why it matters.
I stand beside the car with my coat on and my hands in my pockets and look at the wall like I can force it to give me an answer.
Eleven comes. Then passes.
She doesn’t come.
I check my phone once. Nothing.
She told me not to call. I told her not to answer unless she had to. Now I’m standing in the cold pretending I’m a man who can wait patiently while the minutes keep moving and the wall stays blank.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this is a bad idea.
Not because of danger. I’ve made peace with that as a permanent feature of my life.
Because of her.
Because if she doesn’t come, I’ll still go back tomorrow thinking about the fact that she tried to reach for me and then didn’t, or couldn’t.
And if she does come, I have no idea what I’m going to do with the sight of her once she’s in front of me.
Eleven-ten.
Eleven-fifteen.
At eleven-twenty, I start to think Mikhail was right.
Maybe she can’t get out.
Maybe Sergei posted someone outside her door.
Maybe she read leave the children behind and decided I’d finally lost my mind.
Maybe I had.
I stay anyway.
The river wind is hard enough now to cut through the wool of my coat. Somewhere behind me, one of Mikhail’s cars shifts slightly in place. No headlights. No movement at the wall.
Then, just as I’m about to admit to myself that she isn’t coming, I see motion at the break in the stone.
A dark figure slips through the narrow opening beside the cemetery wall and stops just inside the shadow of the trees.
For one second, it’s only a shape.
Then she steps forward into what little light the road gives her.
Katerina.