Chapter 24 #2
I got her settled on the couch with the blanket over her lap and a pillow under her hip.
In the kitchen I put the kettle on, pulled down the small clay teapot and the box of barley tea from the second shelf where it had always lived.
The tap had the same stiff handle. The drawer under the cutlery still squeaked when you opened it.
I stirred the doenjang once, gently, and the steam went up warm into my face.
I brought the tea out in two small cups and set hers on the low table within reach.
"Sit, sit," she said, patting the blanket. "Tell me everything."
"There is not that much to tell."
"There is the man." She gave me a look over the rim of her cup that was approximately a hundred percent grandmother. "Is he the rich one or the poor one? You did not say."
I laughed. Couldn't help it. I sat down on the couch and tucked one leg under me.
"The rich one."
"Aigoo." She nodded once, solemn. "Then he should be buying you bigger sweaters."
"He buys me plenty of sweaters."
"Not enough. You are still cold." She reached out and put her small warm hand flat against my cheek, then patted twice, brisk. "Tomorrow I make you seollangtang. The good kind. Bone broth. You will look less like a ghost."
"I don't look like a ghost."
"A pretty ghost. Still a ghost."
I leaned over carefully and put my head on her shoulder, on the side away from the bruised hip, and she made a small satisfied sound and did not move.
The Korean drama played on, low. The woman in the snowy park was now arguing with a man in a long coat.
The radiator clanked. The doenjang murmured on the stove.
Somewhere outside a car horn went off and a kid laughed.
I had not been still like this in a long time.
By the time the late evening came, she had eaten a small bowl of soup, a small bowl of rice, and a small bowl of my insisting, and then she had drifted off on the couch with the blanket up to her chin and the drama still going.
I turned the volume down another notch. I tucked the corner of the blanket under her foot where it had slipped.
I kissed the top of her head, light, so I wouldn't wake her.
I took my phone and a fresh cup of barley tea to the tiny kitchen table. I propped the phone against a stack of paper napkins from the takeout place down the block. The chair creaked under me the way it always had. I was halfway through a long slow breath when the screen lit up.
I picked up on the second ring.
His face came onto the screen. He was in our bedroom at the compound. The lamp on his side was on. He was in a soft dark T-shirt, his hair a little messy in the way it got when he had run his hand through it more than once. His eyes were tired. They went soft the second they found me.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"How is she?"
"Good. Bruised. Cranky about it. She made me eat two dinners."
A small huff of breath. The closest he came to a laugh most days.
"Good."
"How was your day?"
"Long." A pause. "Alek and Ivan pulled something useful out of a warehouse on the water. Mikhail is restless. He wants the next piece to move tonight. I am making him wait until morning."
"Restrained of you."
"I am working on it."
I shifted the phone on the napkins so I could see him better. He did the same. His face filled the small screen. The lamp put a warm line along his jaw.
"And you?" he said.
"Tired. Happy. A little sad. The usual when I come here."
He looked at me for a stretch. Just looked. His face did the thing it did, the small softening at the corner of his eyes that almost no one else in the world had ever been allowed to see.
A notification chimed in the corner of his screen. He glanced sideways.
"Rhea has sent a sticker."
"What kind?"
"A bear hugging a heart. There is glitter on it. It is moving."
"Tell her I love it."
"I am forwarding it to your phone as we speak."
Behind him a door opened. A familiar voice shouted something I couldn't quite catch, except for my name, the word brilliant, and what was almost certainly Mikhail's idea of a joke. Daniil closed his eyes for a half second like a man trying to keep his patience.
"Did he just call me brilliant?"
"He called you a treasure. Then he called me an idiot for letting you out of the building. I am paraphrasing."
"He's not wrong about the first part."
"He is never wrong about you. Only about me."
We sat in it for a moment. The kitchen around me was small and warm, his room around him big and quiet, the lit screen the only bright thing between us.
"I miss you," he said.
"It's been one day."
"I have noted that already."
A small laugh came up out of me before I knew it was coming, quiet so I wouldn't wake my grandma in the next room. His mouth pulled at the corner. We sat with it.
"Goodnight, Chloe."
"Goodnight."
I tapped the screen. The call ended. I set the phone down on the napkins and just sat there for a minute, looking at the dark glass where his face had been.
The radiator clanked twice in the wall behind me. My grandma made a small sleepy sound from the couch and turned her face toward the back cushion. The Korean drama played quietly through the doorway, the snow still falling in the little park on the screen.
I had not known, until tonight, what it felt like to be missed by a man who was bad at admitting it and good at showing it anyway.
I sat in my grandma's kitchen, in the warm yellow lamplight, and let myself feel it.