37. Sofia
SOFIA
Three nights since Maxim told me he loved me, and I had spent every single one of them rehearsing the exact opposite of romance in my head, a confession with two parts and no good way to say either of them out loud.
Tonight was the night. I had made the decision somewhere around noon, standing in his kitchen with a mug of tea going cold in my hands, and it had stayed put through an entire afternoon of second-guessing, which for me counted as a personal record.
I would lead with the badge first, then the baby, or maybe the baby first and the badge right behind it before he had time to fully process either one. I hadn't settled on an order.
I had settled on tonight, which felt like the only part of this plan I actually trusted.
My coat was half on, one arm through the sleeve and the other one stubbornly refusing to cooperate, when I caught sight of the sad little fern sitting on the windowsill of my room and decided it owed me an audience.
"Maxim." I addressed the fern directly, dropping my voice into something steadier than I actually felt. "There's something I need to tell you, and I need you to let me get through all of it before you say anything."
The fern did not respond, which I chose to interpret as good listening.
"I'm a federal agent. I have been since before I ever set foot on your dock, and everything about the woman you met that first week was built to get close enough to bring your operation down.
" I paused, waiting for the fern's reaction, and got exactly as much as I expected.
"That's the part where you're supposed to look furious instead of vaguely photosynthetic, but we'll workshop it. "
I tried again, softer this time.
"I fell in love with you somewhere in the middle of lying to you, which I know sounds like the setup to a joke nobody wants to hear the punchline of.
" I finished pulling my coat on properly, addressing the fern's single droopy leaf like it had asked a follow-up question.
"And I'm pregnant. With your baby. Which I have known for eleven days and told absolutely nobody except a doctor sworn to secrecy and, apparently, a houseplant. "
The fern continued not responding, a consistency I found strangely comforting given how badly the actual conversation was likely to go.
I studied it a moment longer, unconvinced by its silence, and decided I owed myself one more attempt before I lost my nerve completely.
"Say something," I told it. "Yell at me. Throw a leaf. Anything."
The fern offered nothing but a single trembling frond, unmoved by threats it had clearly weathered before, and I decided that if a houseplant could sit through my worst material without flinching, Maxim probably could survive it too.
My phone buzzed on the bed before I could attempt a fourth draft, Nina's name lighting up the screen, and I answered it already laughing at myself.
"I need you to talk me down before I go rehearse this in front of a plant again."
"Too late for that?"
"I already did it twice. The fern thinks I'm insane."
"The fern is not wrong, but for entirely different reasons than the ones currently keeping you up at night.
" Nina's voice had that forced brightness she used when she was trying to sound braver on my behalf than she probably felt.
"Okay. Tell me the plan. And please tell me the plan is better than practicing on shrubbery. "
"I go over there. I tell him everything. I stop managing it to death and let the chips fall where they fall."
"That's not a plan, Sofia. That's a jump off a cliff you've decided to call a plan."
"Do you have a better one?"
"I have several, and none of them involve you monologuing at a fern like it's your court-appointed jury." She exhaled hard enough that I heard it clearly through the phone. "Just don't lead with 'so, about my job.' Nobody in the history of relationships has ever recovered from an opener like that."
"What should I lead with?"
"I don't know, something human. 'I love you, and I need to tell you two things that are going to be hard to hear before you decide how you feel about either one.' Something like that. Something that sounds like a person and not a briefing."
"Okay, that's actually good. Write that one down for me."
"I have my moments." A pause stretched out on her end, and when she spoke again some of the brightness had thinned. "For what it's worth, I think you should do this. I've thought that for weeks. You deserve to stop carrying it alone, and so does he, even if he doesn't know it yet."
"You really think it's going to go all right?"
"I think you love him and he loves you and that has to count for something, even against everything else stacked on top of it.
" She said it like she meant every word, and I let myself believe her for exactly as long as the sentence lasted.
"Go. Before you talk yourself into a third round with the fern. "
I laughed, and it came out only a little bit shaky, and I told her I loved her and hung up before I could lose momentum I'd spent an entire afternoon building.
I checked my reflection once in the small mirror by the door, decided it would have to do, and had my hand actually on the doorknob when my phone rang again.
Nina's name lit up the screen a second time, and something about the timing made my stomach drop before I'd even answered, the instinct of a person who had learned the hard way that good news rarely called back this fast.
"Forget something?"
"Sofia." Her voice had gone tight, stripped of every bit of brightness from thirty seconds earlier, and I felt my whole body go still in a way that had nothing to do with the doorknob still in my hand. "I need you to sit down."
"I'm literally on my way out the door."
"Sit down anyway."
I sat, the coat still half on, one sleeve slipping off my shoulder as I lowered myself onto the edge of the bed.
"Talk to me."
"I ran into Marissa from records tonight, the one who used to work the front desk before she moved upstairs.
She mentioned Callahan came by asking questions this afternoon.
" Nina's words came out careful, measured, the way a person spoke when they'd already decided the news wasn't going to land soft no matter how they packaged it. "Not about Kuznetsov. About you."
"What kind of questions?"
"Whether anyone had noticed you acting different lately.
Whether your reports had started reading strange, evasive, like you were leaving things out on purpose.
Whether anyone had heard anything about your, and I'm quoting Marissa here, personal involvement in the case.
" The phrase landed between us with a weight I felt in my chest before my brain had fully caught up to what it meant.
"He asked a records clerk, Sofia. Someone who has no clearance to touch active field assessments, and definitely no business being asked to quietly keep an eye on you. "
Personal involvement, Nina had called it, meaning it the way anyone would mean it, a euphemism for exactly the kind of feelings I'd spent three days trying to work up the nerve to admit out loud.
But I heard it differently now, a second meaning sitting quietly underneath the first one, small and unannounced and mine alone to carry.
"That doesn't necessarily mean anything."
"It means something. It means exactly the kind of something that doesn't show up in an official file yet, which is worse, not better.
" Her voice had dropped lower, the kind of quiet she reserved for the moments that scared her most. "Sofia, I think he's building a file on you. Not on Kuznetsov. On you."
The words settled into the room slow and heavy, and I felt every careful sentence I'd rehearsed for a potted plant curdle into something with sharp edges. Not five minutes ago my biggest worry had been finding the right opening line, and now I couldn't even remember what it was.
"How sure are you?"
"Confident enough that I called you back the second I hung up with her instead of waiting until morning.
" A long breath crackled through the line, unsteady in a way Nina rarely let herself sound.
"I don't know what it means yet. I don't know if it's protocol or paranoia or something worse he's not ready to act on.
I just know it's real, and I know you needed to hear it before you walked into that man's house tonight and handed him a version of yourself with no cover left on it at all. "
I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear, my free hand curled tight around the edge of the mattress, the version of tonight I'd built so carefully collapsing into something unrecognizable in the space of a single phone call.
"If Callahan's already circling me, and I walk in there tonight and tell Maxim everything, I'm not just handing him my secret. I'm handing him whatever Callahan's building too, at the exact moment it's most dangerous for both of us to be holding it."
"I know."
"I was one hallway away, Nina. I had my hand on the door."
"I know that too, and I hate that I'm the one who had to stop you.
" Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, and I heard her breathe through it before continuing.
"But you can't walk in there tonight not knowing what's coming for you from the other direction.
That's not caution, that's just math. Tell him when you actually know what you're protecting him from. "
"And if I wait too long?"
"Then we deal with that when it happens. Tonight, you don't go anywhere. Tonight, you stay put and let me find out exactly how much rope Callahan's given himself before you hand him more to work with."
I closed my eyes, the coat sleeve finally slipping the rest of the way off my shoulder, and let the plan I'd been building all day settle quietly into the pile of things I wasn't doing tonight after all.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay. I'm not going anywhere tonight." I said it slowly, testing the shape of it, hating how right it felt even as it broke something loose in my chest. "Find out what you can. Please."
"I will. I promise." She stayed on the line another moment, neither of us saying anything useful, both of us just breathing into the quiet like it might tell us something the words hadn't. "I'm sorry, Sofia. I know how long you've been building up to tonight."
"It's not your fault Callahan's Callahan."
"No, but I still hate being the one who had to say it."
We hung up a few minutes later, and I sat there in the settling dark of my room with my coat still half on, looking every bit as unfinished as the conversation I'd just failed to have.
The fern sat exactly where I'd left it, unbothered, unimpressed, the same silent audience it had been an hour ago when the biggest problem in my life was finding the right words instead of finding out I might already be out of time to say any of them.
I almost apologized to it for wasting its evening.
I didn't go to the compound that night. I sat on the edge of my bed until the coat felt less like a plan and more like a costume I'd forgotten to take off.
Somewhere in the middle of taking it off at last, I understood that whatever window I'd had to walk in on my own terms had just closed quietly behind me, whether I was ready or not.