17. Sofia
SOFIA
My duffel bag exploded across a bed the size of a small country, and I stood there in the wreckage of it feeling like an intruder in my own borrowed room.
Two days of unpacking in fits and starts had taught me one thing about the east guest suite. It had been built for a life with almost nothing in it, and I had brought enough chaos for three lifetimes.
Shirts spilled over the footboard, and a single boot stood upright near the closet like it had given up looking for its match.
Somewhere under a pile of leggings sat the good bra I needed for tomorrow, and I had already stopped believing I would find it before I lost my mind trying.
I gathered an armful of clothes toward the closet and stopped in the doorway, staring at the three shirts already hanging there, spaced with an evenness that looked almost surgical.
Nothing about that closet had prepared me for the rest of the house. Every room I'd seen so far ran the same way, clean lines, empty surfaces, furniture that looked like it had been chosen to be looked at rather than used.
I hung my things beside his careful three shirts and felt like I'd tracked mud across a museum floor.
Maxim appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, took one look at the room, and stopped walking entirely.
"What happened in here?"
"A duffel bag happened. Try to be brave about it."
"There's a shoe on the windowsill."
"It's there because the closet has a system now, and the system doesn't have room for shoes yet."
He crossed to the closet, studied my three shirts crowding his three shirts, and reached out to straighten one of mine like the misalignment had physically offended him.
"You're doing that on purpose."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"You moved my shirt two inches to the left."
"Your shirt was already two inches to the left of where it should have been. I fixed it."
He gave me a long look, equal parts exasperation and a warmth he didn't bother hiding, and left the closet exactly as I'd arranged it, which felt like a small, undeclared victory.
"I'll be downstairs," he said. "Try not to set off any alarms up here."
"No promises."
He was already laughing under his breath as he disappeared down the hallway, and I stood there a moment longer, absurdly pleased with myself over two inches of closet real estate.
The kitchen, when I found my way down to it that evening, was no better. Steel counters gleamed under recessed lighting, and not one surface held a single trace of anything that suggested someone actually cooked there.
I decided that was exactly the kind of quiet challenge I couldn't resist.
Forty minutes later I stood over a pan that had gone from confident to catastrophic somewhere between the garlic and my second glass of wine, smoke curling toward a detector I prayed was decorative.
"Sofia."
I jumped hard enough to nearly drop the pan, and turned to find Maxim in the doorway, sleeves already rolled, watching the scene with an expression caught somewhere between concern and barely restrained amusement.
"It's under control," I said, in the exact tone of someone whose situation was not under control.
"Is it?"
"Mostly."
He crossed the kitchen without hurrying, lifted the pan off the heat with a dish towel like he'd done it a thousand times, and set it in the sink where it hissed at both of us in protest.
"What was it supposed to be?"
"Garlic butter shrimp. It was going very well until it wasn't."
"There's no shrimp in this pan."
"There was shrimp. Briefly. It didn't survive the transition."
He laughed, low and real, the kind of laugh I hadn't heard enough of from him yet to stop noticing every single time.
"Sit," he said, already reaching for a fresh pan from a drawer I hadn't even known existed. "I'll fix it."
"You don't have to fix my disaster."
"I want to fix your disaster. There's a difference."
I sat on a stool at the island and watched him work, and it was, without question, the strangest thing I had witnessed since walking into this house.
He moved through that kitchen with the same economy he brought to everything else, no wasted motion, knives handled like they mattered, and somewhere in the middle of chopping fresh garlic he started humming something low under his breath.
It took me a second to place the language.
"Are you humming in Russian?"
He blinked, like he hadn't noticed he was doing it at all.
"Apparently."
"Don't stop on my account."
"I wasn't planning to." He went back to the pan, unbothered, the melody picking back up exactly where it had left off, a low, wistful thread underneath the domestic ease of the moment. "My grandmother used to sing it while she cooked. It stuck."
"That's oddly sweet, coming from you."
"I contain multitudes, Reyes."
"You contain a spice rack that's alphabetized. That's not multitudes, that's a diagnosis."
"It's efficient."
"It's a cry for help with excellent penmanship."
He shot me a look over his shoulder that had no real heat in it, and went back to work, and I sat there watching a man who ran half the docks in this city cook shrimp like it was the only task that mattered to him in the world.
Twenty minutes later we ate at the small table by the window instead of the enormous formal one down the hall, and the shrimp, infuriatingly, was better than anything I would have managed on my best night.
"This is embarrassing," I said, around a bite I refused to admit was that good out loud.
"Which part?"
"The part where you're better at my own recipe than I am."
"It wasn't your recipe. It was your ambition wearing a recipe's clothes."
"That's rude and also probably fair."
We fell into an easy quiet after that, forks against plates, the kind of comfortable silence I hadn't expected to find anywhere inside these walls.
I got up at one point for water and pulled open the drawer near the counter that had stuck on my very first day here, the one I'd never bothered forcing since, and this time it finally gave way under a little pressure.
Inside sat a photograph, old enough that the color had faded toward sepia at the edges, tucked behind a stack of unused placemats like someone had shoved it there in a hurry a long time ago and never come back for it.
A woman looked out from the photo, dark haired, sharp eyed, laughing at something outside the frame with her head tipped back.
I knew, before I even asked, that I was holding a piece of him I hadn't been meant to find.
"Maxim."
He looked up, and something crossed his face when he saw what I was holding, quick and unguarded before he caught it and smoothed it back down.
I braced for the drawer to close, for the subject to shut as fast as it had opened, the way I'd already learned he handled most things that cut too close.
"Who is she?"
He didn't reach for the photo. He didn't ask me to put it back, either.
"My mother." He said it simply, no wall behind it that I could find. "She'd have liked you. She hated almost everyone I ever brought home."
"High praise, then."
"The highest she gave anyone."
I set the photo carefully on the table between us instead of putting it away, some instinct telling me that was what he actually wanted, and he looked at it a long moment before he spoke again.
"She used to stand at that counter for hours, most weekends. My father would complain about the smell of onions in his study and she'd tell him to go complain somewhere she couldn't hear him."
"What happened to her?"
"She got sick. It took longer than anyone expected, and then it didn't take long enough.
" He said it evenly, the kind of even that came from years of practice rather than indifference.
"I was young. Andrei was younger. My father never really recovered, not the way people mean when they say that about someone. "
"Is that where the humming came from? Not just your grandmother?"
He looked at me like I'd caught a detail he hadn't expected anyone to catch.
"She sang that same song. My grandmother taught it to her first." A small, genuine smile crossed his face, gone as quickly as it arrived. "I didn't realize I still did it until you asked."
"I'm glad I asked."
"So am I."
It was such a small admission, and it landed harder than anything he'd said to me since the night at my car, harder because I could see exactly what it cost a man like him to leave a drawer open instead of shutting it the second someone got too close to what was inside.
"Your turn," he said, nodding at the photo. "Tell me something about your mother."
"She used to burn garlic bread every single time, on purpose, because my dad liked the edges black. Said the whole loaf tasted like a house fire and ate it anyway."
"That sounds like a marriage that worked."
"It did. Until it didn't have to work anymore, and then it just was."
He didn't push for more than that, and I loved him a little for it, though I wasn't ready to hand that word to either of us yet, not out loud, not tonight.
We ate the rest of dinner slower than we needed to, trading small pieces of two families that had both survived losing someone too early. Grief sounded easier between us than I ever expected it to, given how little we'd trusted each other just three weeks earlier.
My phone buzzed against the table hard enough to rattle a fork.
I glanced down out of habit before I could stop myself, and my stomach dropped clean through the floor.
CALLAHAN, the screen said, bright and unmistakable, exactly where anyone glancing across the table might read it without even trying.
I flipped the phone face down, faster than I meant to, and reached for my water like the motion could cover the half second of panic that must have already crossed my face.
"Sorry. Work thing. It can wait."
"Mm."
Maxim reached for the pitcher and refilled my glass without being asked, unhurried, his eyes flicking once toward the phone before returning to mine, and something in his expression had gone quieter than it had been thirty seconds earlier, careful in a way that hadn't been there over the shrimp or the photograph or any of the easy hour before it.
"Everything alright?"
"Fine. Just a coworker who doesn't understand the concept of after hours."
"Must be a persistent one."
"You have no idea."
He held my gaze a beat longer than the moment strictly needed, and I couldn't tell if what sat behind his eyes was simple curiosity or something with sharper edges underneath it.
It felt tucked away for later, the same quiet cataloging I'd watched him do with everything else since the first night I met him.
"Eat," he said finally, gesturing at my plate with the same warmth from a minute ago, easy again, or close enough to it that I almost believed the shift hadn't happened at all.
I ate. I laughed at the next thing he said about Yuri's terrible taste in music.
I let the evening close soft and warm around both of us again, right up until my phone lit up with a name that didn't belong anywhere near this table.
But some part of me stayed braced the rest of the night, waiting to see whether the ease between us was real, or whether a man who noticed everything had simply decided not to ask out loud yet. I didn't know which answer scared me more.