30. Sloane
SLOANE
My brother’s hospital room has become so familiar that I know which floorboard near the window gives a faint creak when the night nurse steps on it, which fluorescent light above the sink takes three seconds longer than the others to stop flickering, and exactly how far I can pull the visitor’s chair toward Ethan’s bed before one of the nurses tells me I’m blocking the equipment.
I sit there anyway, close enough that my knee touches the side of the mattress, watching my brother sleep beneath a blanket that seems to grow heavier every week while he grows thinner beneath it.
There are mornings when I can still convince myself he looks like himself.
If the light falls the right way, if his eyes are closed and I ignore the hollow beneath his cheekbones, I can look at him and remember the brother who used to steal food from my plate because he claimed everything tasted better when somebody else paid for it.
The brother who once drove three hours in the middle of the night because my car broke down and I was too embarrassed to call anyone else.
The brother who used to complain that I worried too much while quietly letting me worry anyway.
Those mornings are becoming rarer.
His skin has taken on that washed-out hospital pallor that makes every vein at his wrist visible, and even when he’s awake he tires halfway through conversations, his eyelids growing heavy while I’m still trying to pretend we have all the time in the world.
The machines around him make soft, repetitive noises that I barely hear anymore.
A month ago, every alarm made my heart jump. Now I know which ones matter.
I hate that I know.
Ethan stirs. His fingers move against the blanket.
I reach for his hand immediately. “Hey.”
His eyes open slowly. For a second, they’re unfocused, then they settle on me.
“You’re still here.”
“Obviously.”
“You should go home.”
“I went home yesterday.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“It absolutely counts.”
“You were gone for forty minutes.”
“I changed clothes.”
“You came back wearing the same coat.”
“It’s a good coat.”
He looks at me for another second, then the corner of his mouth moves. The smile is weak, but it’s there. I would do almost anything to keep it there.
“You look tired,” he says.
“That’s very rude considering your current situation.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
His thumb shifts faintly against my hand. “You need sleep.”
“I sleep.”
“Here.”
“Still sleep.”
He breathes out something that might be a laugh, then closes his eyes again. The effort of those few sentences has already taken something out of him. I look away before he can see my face change.
The city outside the window is unfamiliar enough that sometimes I still wake and forget where I am, but that happens less now.
I know the streets around the hospital, the small grocery shop two blocks from the apartment I rented under a name close enough to mine that I would answer if somebody called it, the laundromat where nobody asks why I come at strange hours, the pharmacy that stays open until midnight, the café where I sit when the hospital staff force me outside long enough to eat.
I moved because staying where I lived before felt impossible. Too easy to find. Too connected to every piece of my old life.
The apartment is temporary, furnished badly, and small enough that I can stand in the center of the living room and see almost every door. I prefer it that way.
I spend very little time there. Most days I leave the hospital only when I need a shower, fresh clothes, or enough sleep to stop the headaches that begin behind my eyes after too many nights in this chair.
Sometimes I tell Ethan I have work. He knows I’m lying, but he doesn’t ask.
There are pieces of the last few months that I try not to arrange in the correct order.
Viktor’s voice on the phone telling me to stay where I was.
A driver arriving the next morning with cash, documents, and instructions that somehow took me farther away from Vadim than I had managed on my own.
I remember asking too many questions.
I remember Viktor answering only some of them.
I remember crossing another border and then another airport, changing routes twice, waiting in terminals where nobody knew my name and trying not to look over my shoulder every time a silver-haired man entered my peripheral vision.
By the time I reached home, I was exhausted enough that the first thing I did was sit on the floor of the airport bathroom and cry.
I never told Ethan that part. I never told him most of it.
He knows I had trouble overseas. He knows I came back suddenly. He knows I changed cities because I wanted to be closer to the hospital where his treatment moved.
That’s enough. It has to be.
I look back at him now. He’s fallen asleep again, his hand still inside mine.
I stay until the afternoon nurse comes in to check his medication. She smiles at me in the careful way people do when they have begun to recognize grief before the person experiencing it is ready to call it that. “You should get something to eat.”
“I ate.”
She looks at the untouched sandwich near the window. “That was breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You still need to eat.”
“I will.”
She gives me the same look I give Ethan when he lies.
I almost tell her that irony is cruel. Instead, I stand. My legs ache from sitting too long. “I’ll go home for an hour.”
“Two.”
“One and a half.”
She sighs.
I lean over Ethan and kiss his forehead. He doesn’t wake.
The hospital corridor smells like disinfectant, old coffee, and something metallic I can never quite identify. I walk past families sitting in plastic chairs, past a child asleep across two seats with his head in his mother’s lap, past a man arguing quietly into a phone near the elevators.
I keep my head down. Not because I think anyone here knows me, but because I have developed habits I don’t know how to stop. I check reflections, car mirrors, people standing still too long.
It’s ridiculous. I know that. Vadim is probably not here. He may not even be looking anymore.
Some days I hope he’s not.
Other days the thought that he might have stopped hurts enough that I become angry with myself for caring.
I tell myself I escaped. That should be the important part. I got away from the compound, away from the guards, away from the man who decided where I slept, where I traveled, and whether I was allowed to leave.
I got home. I got back to Ethan.
I should feel safe.
Instead, every few days I see silver hair in a crowd and my body forgets how to behave.
It happens again outside the hospital. I’m crossing the road with the pedestrian light when I see him on the opposite pavement—tall, broad shoulders, silver that shines in the afternoon sunlight. My foot stops in the middle of the crossing.
A horn sounds behind me.
Someone swears.
I can’t move. For one suspended second, everything inside me knows it’s Vadim. My heart crashes against my ribs so hard that it hurts.
He found me.
A man like him doesn’t lose people.
The figure turns. He’s not Vadim. He’s older, shorter through the shoulders, his face completely wrong. Relief hits first, followed quickly by disappointment.
I hate myself for it.
I finish crossing quickly, ignoring the driver who gestures angrily from behind the windshield. My hands are shaking by the time I reach the other side.
“Still doing that?”
I turn on my feet abruptly.
Viktor stands several feet away.
He’s dressed simply today, dark trousers and a charcoal coat, no tie, no polished club smile, though there’s still something composed about him that makes every ordinary setting look slightly staged around his presence.
I stare at him. “You can’t just sneak up on people.”
“I said your name twice.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
“I noticed.” He glances across the road toward the silver-haired stranger walking away.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Checking on you.”
“You checked on me last week.”
“That’s generally how checking works,” he says.
I sigh. Despite everything, there’s something strangely easy about talking to him now. That’s another thing I try not to examine too closely.
Vadim spoke about Viktor as though he were a plague given human form. A man who sent people to kill him.
Yet the Viktor I know brought me home. He arranged transportation when I had nowhere to go, found a way to get me back without alerting the people I was terrified might be watching the airports, and never once demanded anything in return.
He never stays long. He never pushes when I don’t want to talk.
I can’t reconcile that man with the one Vadim described.
Then again, perhaps that’s the problem. For weeks I couldn’t reconcile Vadim either. The man who carried me after Hale attacked me. The man who held me when I woke from nightmares. The man who laughed with Anya and fixed Boris’s ear because a six-year-old told him to.
The man who pointed a gun at Camille and fired without hesitation.
Maybe people are whatever version of themselves they need you to see.
Viktor nods toward the café on the corner. “Coffee?”
“I should go home.”
“You look like you haven’t eaten.”
“Why is everyone obsessed with feeding me today?”
“Because you look terrible.”
I stare at him. “That was unnecessarily honest.”
“You prefer lies?”
The question catches slightly.
I look away. “No.”
We end up inside the café anyway. I order tea because the thought of coffee makes my stomach turn for reasons I blame on stress, and Viktor sits opposite me without taking off his coat.
“How is your brother?”
“Not good,” I say. I hate the way my voice chokes on the two words.
His expression changes. “I’m sorry.”
I look down at the table. “They’re changing his treatment again.”
“Will it help?”
“I don’t know.”
That’s the answer I give everyone now.
I don’t know.
Nobody knows. Medicine becomes terrifying when the people using it stop making promises.
Viktor doesn’t offer reassurance. I appreciate him for that.
After a few seconds, he asks, “Do you need anything?”
“No.”
“Money?”
“No.”
“A different doctor?”
“No.”
“Anything?”
I shake my head. “I just need him to get better.”
Viktor says nothing. There’s no useful response to that.
We sit quietly for a while.
Then I look at him. “I asked you something before.”
“I remember many things you ask.”
“Why does Vadim hate you?”
Something passes through his eyes. It’s brief. Then gone.
“I told you.”
“You said it was family.”
“It is.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
“It’s the only one I’m willing to give.”
I study him. “You tried to kill him.”
Viktor’s mouth tightens slightly. “I would prefer not to discuss Chernovar while you are sitting here worrying about your brother.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Probably.”
I keep looking at him.
He sighs. “There are things between our families that began before you knew either of us. He harmed someone I love.”
I suck in a breath. Even though he doesn’t say it, I know what he means. Vadim has killed someone in his family. Because that’s what Vadim is at the end of the day—not what he is to me, but to the people around me. He’s a monster.
We sit for a few minutes before he gets up. “Eat something,” he says.
“I will.”
“You won’t.”
“Probably not.”
“That’s what I thought.” He leaves.
I watch him walk away before heading home.
The apartment feels too quiet after the hospital. I shower, change into fresh clothes, put another set into my bag for tomorrow, then stand in the kitchen staring at the refrigerator until I remember I came home partly because I was supposed to eat.
I manage toast. Half of it. That’s as much as I manage before exhaustion wins.
By the time I change into an old T-shirt and crawl into my own bed, I tell myself I’m only going to close my eyes for twenty minutes before heading back to the hospital.
When I wake again, the room is dark. For a few disorienting seconds I have no idea what time it is, only that the apartment has gone completely quiet and the faint orange glow from the streetlights is spilling through the curtains.
My phone is face down beside me, and my whole body feels heavy in the way it has for months now, every movement requiring slightly more effort than it used to.
I roll onto my back carefully and rest both hands over the curve beneath my shirt.
Seven months. The thought still feels impossible sometimes.
My palm moves slowly across my stomach, and almost immediately there’s a faint shift beneath my hand, a small rolling movement that makes something inside my chest soften despite everything else.
“Hi,” I whisper.
Nobody knows except Ethan.
I’ve become very good at hiding it beneath loose clothes, oversized coats, and the careful angles of someone who has spent months making sure nobody looks too closely.
Ethan found out because there are some things you can’t hide from the person who has known you your entire life, especially when he notices you vomiting in a hospital bathroom and then sees prenatal vitamins fall out of your bag two days later.
I sit up slowly and keep one hand beneath my stomach as I cross the room. The baby moves again, and I rub the place absently while walking toward the window, pushing the curtain aside with my other hand.
The street below is mostly empty. A few cars pass beneath the lights. Someone walks a dog near the corner. For a moment, I think there’s a man standing across the road, watching the building.
My hand stops over my belly. I lean closer to the glass.
A bus passes, and when it clears, there’s nobody there.
I exhale and let the curtain fall partly closed.
This is what my life has become. Looking for Vadim in every shadow while praying I never actually find him.
I should want nothing to do with him. I should remember Camille whenever I think of his hands on me, his mouth against mine, the way he used to rest his palm over my stomach when we slept even before there was anything there to feel.
Instead, my fingers spread protectively over the child he doesn’t know exists.
That’s the worst part.
I escaped the monster.
And somehow, I still fell in love with him.