Zoya
By the time we turn the water off, the bathroom is all steam and quiet breathing.
For a moment, neither of us moves. My forehead rests against his chest. His hand is at the back of my neck, warm and steady, and if I let myself think too much about how natural that feels, I’ll ruin it.
So I don’t.
I reach for the towel first.
He catches my wrist lightly. “Wait.”
“What?”
He takes the towel from the hook and wraps it around my shoulders before I can argue. Then he gets another one for himself and does the same, slower than usual because of the leg.
It feels strange and intimate in a way sex somehow didn’t. Sex I know how to survive. This softness is harder.
He kneels a little to dry my calves and feet so I don’t slip when I step out. I stare down at him, my throat tight for reasons I don’t want to examine, and when I step onto the bath mat he straightens carefully, wincing only once.
“Sit,” he says.
“You’re injured.”
“And you’re shaking.”
I am. A little.
I sit on the closed toilet lid. He picks up my clothes piece by piece and helps me into them without making it feel clinical or rushed.
He eases my blouse over my shoulders, fastens two buttons when my fingers miss, then looks away while I fix the rest myself.
I dry his hair with the towel because if I don’t do something with my hands, I’ll end up touching his face and that feels too close to a confession.
When I bend to look at his bandage, he says, “I’m fine.”
“You are absolutely not.”
“It held.”
“Your standards are embarrassing.”
That gets the smallest pull at the corner of his mouth.
I crouch carefully and check the edge of the dressing where water might have gotten in. He steadies himself on the sink and lets me fuss. That alone tells me more about his state than any honest answer would.
When I’m done, I stand and say, “You shouldn’t put weight on it for a while.”
“I gathered that when I was shot.”
I give him a flat look. “Still annoying.”
“You say that like it’s new.”
We leave the bathroom quieter than we entered it.
The cottage is dark except for the lamp by the sofa. The girls are asleep in the bedroom, and the house has that thin, fragile silence of a place holding too many emotions at once. I bring him painkillers and water. He takes both without argument, which means he really is in pain.
I sit at the other end of the sofa with my legs tucked under me and my wet hair over one shoulder.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
Then he asks, “Were you all right?”
I look at him. “That’s a very large question.”
“Yes.”
“No,” I say honestly. “Not for a while.”
He nods once, like he expected that.
I stare at the lamp instead of at him. “The first few months were awful. I was sick all the time. Tired. Angry. Scared.” I laugh without humor. “I used to cry because the kettle took too long.”
He says nothing.
“I told my parents I’d made a mistake with a man who couldn’t be in my life. That was the soft version. My mother cried. My father tried not to. Karina nearly committed murder in my honor several times.”
At that, he does look at me.
I continue before I can stop. “I found a small flat. Then a worse one. Then a better one after the girls were born. I worked whatever I could from home at first. Cataloguing jobs, records clean-up, archive data, anything that paid and didn’t require me to explain why I couldn’t come into an office with two newborns. ”
His gaze stays on me. It’s not pity. Thank God.
“I learned how to do everything at once,” I say. “Feed one baby while changing the other. Sleep sitting up. Smile at health visitors while feeling like I might disappear. There were months when I knew exactly how much milk, electricity, and hope I had left, and all three numbers were bad.”
“Zoya.”
Just my name.
Low. Regret in it.
I shake my head. “Don’t.”
He goes quiet.
After a moment, he asks, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I laugh once and look at him properly. “Because you sent me away. Because your life was full of men with guns and people who died badly. Because I was pregnant and terrified and didn’t trust you to make us safer.”
He takes that without flinching this time.
“I looked for you,” he says.
My chest tightens immediately, stupidly. “I know.”
That surprises him.
I rub my thumb against the seam of the cushion. “Not directly. You never found me. But I saw the ripples.”
“What ripples?”
I hesitate, then tell the truth because we are so far past useful lies.
“Police alerts. Local reports. Crime pages. The kind of stories people read with coffee and cluck over before getting on with their day. Warehouse fire. Assault in the docks. A shooting tied to organized crime. A customs raid that vanished from the news in twelve hours. Your name never appeared. But other names did. Places did. Patterns did.”
His expression changes.
“I kept track,” I admit. “Not every day. I told myself it was only when I got nervous. Then I told myself it was because if something happened to you, I should know for the girls’ sake.” I look down. “That was also a lie.”
He’s very still. “You researched me,” he says.
“I monitored you,” I correct.
“Obsessively?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Why?” he asks.
The real answer is sitting right there between us, warm from the shower and six years too old to be called a crush.
Instead I say, “Because I needed to know whether the thing I ran from was still moving.”
He studies me for a long moment. “And?”
“And it was.”
He leans back slowly against the sofa. “I checked records too. Leases. school systems. false names. Anything I could reach without dragging the whole city over your trail.” He looks at the ceiling. “You were better at leaving than I expected.”
That should satisfy me. Instead, it hurts in a new way.
“You looked,” I say.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
His answer takes too long.
“Long enough that stopping felt like failure,” he says finally.
Something in my throat closes. I look away.
This is the point where either of us could say too much. The room feels full of it. All the things that nearly have shape.
I could tell him I hated him and wanted him and checked for news of him when the girls had fevers. I could tell him I hated that I was the only one there for them, when he wasn’t even aware of the girls’ existence.
He could tell me whatever is sitting in his face right now, rawer than I’ve ever seen it.
Instead he says, “Mila gets attached quickly.”
I laugh because otherwise I might cry. “Yes.”
“And Nadia trusts slowly.”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t miss much.”
“No,” I say. “She never has.”
He nods. “They’re good girls.”
The sentence is so simple and so wrecking that I have to stand up. “I should check on them.”
He knows I’m running from the moment. He lets me.
The bedroom is warm and dim. Mila has thrown half her blanket on the floor. Nadia has one hand curled near her cheek and the other still clutching the edge of her book. I tuck Mila back in and lift the book from Nadia’s hand. Both of them stay asleep.
When I turn back, Ruslan is in the doorway, one hand braced on the frame.
I whisper, “I told you not to walk.”
“You took too long.”
“That sounds like a line.”
“It’s a fact.”
He looks at the girls, and whatever else he is, whatever else he has done, there is nothing false in his face then. He looks like a man trying to memorize something he never thought he would see.
I stand beside him. Close enough that our arms almost touch. We stay like that until it becomes too much and not enough all at once.
“Get some sleep,” I whisper.
He looks down at me.
There it is again, that almost-confession, that terrible soft edge.
“You too,” he says.
We don’t kiss. We don’t say anything at all.
He goes back to the sofa. I stand there for a second, watching him settle with that careful, stubborn control of his, like pain is something he can negotiate with if he refuses to look at it directly.
Then I look at the armchair in the girls’ room, imagine another night with my neck bent at the wrong angle and my mind running in circles, and I feel suddenly, irrationally tired of pretending distance is still protecting anything.
“The couch is too small,” I say.
He looks up at me.
I hate that one look still does things to me.
“The bed in the other room is made,” I add. “You’ll tear your leg up if you keep twisting like that.”
For a moment he says nothing.
Then, “Are you telling me to move?”
“I’m telling you I don’t want to hear you fall off that couch in the middle of the night and then have to explain to my daughters why there’s a grown man unconscious beside the coffee table.”
That almost gets a smile out of him.
“Very kind,” he says.
“I’m not kind,” I say. “I’m practical.”
He nods once, like he knows better and is choosing not to say it.
It takes longer than it should to get him down the hall.
He refuses help at first, then accepts it badly, then finally lets me take some of his weight without arguing every second.
The spare room is small, barely more than a bed, a narrow wardrobe, and a lamp with a crooked shade.
It feels too intimate the moment we step into it.
Maybe because it is.
He sits on the edge of the mattress with a low exhale, and I kneel to check the bandage again because it’s easier than looking at his face.
“It’s fine,” he says.
“You keep saying that like it means anything.”
“It means stop fussing.”
“I’ll stop fussing when people stop getting shot in my vicinity.”
He looks down at me, and for one strange second, all the years between us feel thin.
I straighten and pull the blanket back. “Lie down,” I say.
He does.
That surprises me enough that I stand there for a second longer than necessary. Then I move to the other side of the bed.
His eyes follow me. “What are you doing?”
“Sleeping.”
“In here?”
“I’m not leaving you alone in case your fever comes back.”
“That’s not why.”
I climb into bed and turn off the lamp before he can say anything else. The room drops into darkness broken only by the strip of moonlight coming through the curtains.
I lie on my back at first, hands folded over my stomach like a corpse in a cautionary tale. He’s warm beside me. Not touching. Just there.
After a while, he says quietly, “You don’t have to do this.”
“I know.”
Silence again.
Then, because there’s no point lying in the dark with this much truth crowded between us, I say, “You found out in a grocery store.”
“Yes.”
“That’s humiliating.”
“No,” he says.
“It is for me.”
I feel him turn his head on the pillow. “For me too,” he says after a moment. “Just differently.”
I close my eyes.
I don’t ask how. If he tells me how, then I might tell him my own version, and I don’t want to cry in a room where he can hear it.
Sometime later, I roll without meaning to and wake enough to realize my hand is on his chest. He doesn’t move it.
I should. I don’t.
The last thing I remember before sleep takes me fully is his breathing slowing under my palm.
When I wake, the bed is empty. For one awful second, I don’t understand what’s wrong. The room is pale with morning. The blanket beside me is cold. My hand closes over nothing.
Then my phone starts ringing.
Karina.
I sit up and answer immediately. “What?”
“Well, good morning to you too,” she says, but her voice sounds wrong. Tight.
My heart is already racing. I throw the blanket back and cross the room. “Where are you?”
“At home. Listen to me carefully.”
I go to the window and push the curtain aside. The yard outside is quiet.
I hear her exhale. “I’ve been trying to decide whether to tell you this in person, but after last night, I don’t think we have the luxury.”
A cold feeling starts low in my stomach.
I grip the phone harder. “Tell me what?”
“The number,” she says.
For a second, I don’t follow. Then I do.
The unknown number. The wrong number that was never wrong.
I close my eyes. “Not now.”
“Yes, now,” Karina says. “You need to know how bad this is.”
I rest my forehead against the glass. “Karina.”
“The number wasn’t random at all,” she says.
I go very still. “What do you mean?”
“I took it from the library system.”
The words don’t make sense at first. Then they do, and I feel sick.
“You what?”
“That day. After everything happened at the library. He came in so often, and I knew you were obsessed, and when I was helping with the desk login later, I saw his details on the library card account. I copied the number.”
I can’t speak for a second. My hand is shaking now.
“You stole his number,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You gave me his number.”
“Yes.”
There’s shame in her voice now, real and ugly. Good. She should feel it.
I stare out at the trees but see the library desk instead. Ruslan’s card. His name in the system. Karina laughing, telling me to text a random number and get some confidence.
Nothing random at all.
“What the fuck, Karina?”
“I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
“I do,” she says quietly. “I’ve known for a while that I messed up.”
I push away from the window and start pacing because if I stay still, I might throw the phone. “How could you not tell me?”
“Because at first it felt like a stupid accident that somehow turned into… whatever it turned into. And then—” She stops.
I stop too. “And then what?”
She says nothing.
That silence is worse than the confession.
“And then what?” I ask again.
Her voice drops. “I sold the same information to someone else.”
Everything in me goes cold.
“I didn’t know who he was, who he really was till you told me.
Swear to God, Zoya, I didn’t. It was a few weeks before the attack.
A man approached me outside work. He said he was trying to reach Ruslan Karelin for a legal matter and couldn’t get through his office.
He offered money just for confirmation that he was at the library, and when he was there. ”
I can barely breathe. “You sold it?”
“I’m so sorry, babe. I had no idea what I had signed up for,” she says. “And I swear I totally forgot about that, till now. I’m sorry I didn’t come clean to you before. I didn’t think—”
“No,” I say. “You didn’t.”
Her voice breaks. “I know.”
My whole body is buzzing now. I grip the phone so hard my fingers hurt. “What was the man’s name?” I ask.
Karina hesitates.
My voice comes out flat. “Karina. What was the name?”
She answers in a whisper.
“Someone called Lenkov.”