Chapter 24
ISAAK
She tells me in the dark, after, when she thinks I'm most of the way asleep, which is the only time my wife ever says the true things first.
I'm not asleep. I haven't slept all the way through a night since I was nineteen and learned what happens to men who do. But I let her think I'm under, because she talks to me more honestly when she believes I won't remember it. I've learned to lie still and bank every word.
"I have to tell you something," she says, into my chest, her hand flat over my heart. "And I need you to not do anything. Not call anyone, not make a plan, not solve it. I need you to just lie here, hear it, and be a person for one minute. Can you do that?"
"I can do that." My voice comes out rough. She startles a little, because she thought she had a sleeping man, and I tighten my arm so she can't go anywhere. "I'm here. Say it."
She's quiet long enough that I brace for a confession. I get the opposite.
"I'm pregnant."
The words go into me and stop my whole life.
I don't move. I made her a promise to be a person for one minute and I am holding to it with everything I have, lying dead still in the dark with my hand on her back while the floor of the world drops out from under the bed.
Pregnant. A child. Mine. Hers and mine.
I keep my breathing even by force, the way I kept it even through a beating at twenty-two that was meant to end me, because if I move she'll read it as the wrong thing. There is no wrong thing happening in me, only a thing so big I have no container built to hold it.
A boy I used to be, hungry in a cold flat, giving his bread to a smaller boy and calling it not being hungry, is somewhere very close to the surface tonight. I've spent thirty years making sure that boy never gets to speak, but he's speaking now. He wants to know if this one will get fed.
I have spent forty years being a thing people use.
My mother kept me for what I'd be worth grown.
The men who swear to me stay for the protection, the name, the wallet, every one of them with a hand out.
I built a whole self around the rule that this is all I am, a strongbox with a heartbeat, valuable and never wanted.
I made my peace with it. I made it my strength.
Now there's going to be a person who is half me and who can't possibly want me for any of it, because a baby has no use for a pakhan.
A baby doesn't care what I own. Doesn't care who fears me.
Can't be kept on a debt or sent home with a problem solved.
A child is going to need me for things I have never been asked to be, and want me for nothing I know how to hand over.
I have no idea, not the first idea, how to be loved like that, because nobody has ever tried to teach me.
"Say something," Nora whispers. "You're scaring me. You haven't moved."
I have to sit up. I can't take it lying down, the size of it, so I move her gently off my chest and sit up on the edge of the bed, my back to her, my feet on the cold floor, my head in my hands, dragging air like the wind's been knocked clean out of me.
"Isaak." The bed shifts. Her hand settles between my shoulder blades, warm, uncertain. "Okay. Okay, that's, you're allowed to be however you are about this. Just talk to me. Is it, do you not want."
"It's wanted." I get it out before she can finish the sentence that would gut us both.
I turn enough to find her in the dark, sitting up with the sheet clutched to her, her face open and braced for the worst. I can't let her sit in that for one more second.
"Nora. Look at me. I want it. That's not the part I'm having trouble with. "
The relief that goes over her face nearly finishes me.
She's been holding her breath since she said it.
I can see now the weeks she spent preparing for the wrong thing coming out of me, the careful way she's been watching my face, the trying-to-be-small.
She was afraid I'd look at her the way my mother once looked at everything she'd been handed without asking for it.
I watch the fear go out of her. The trust comes back in its place.
I don't know if I have deserved it yet. I know I'm going to try.
"Then what's the part?" she says.
I'm a man who has talked his way out of executions. I don't have words for this. I make myself find them anyway, because she taught me that the truth said badly beats a lie said well, and she's owed the truth even when it's the ugliest thing in me.
"I don't know how to be wanted for free.
" It comes out hollow, the way the worst true things do.
"I know how to be needed. I know how to be the man who fixes it, stands in front of it with a gun.
That I can do in my sleep. But a child isn't going to need any of that from me.
A child is just going to, what." My voice does something I don't allow it to do.
"Love me. For nothing. Because I'm theirs.
And I have no equipment for that, Nora. Nobody ever did it to me.
I don't know how. Scared of a person the size of a lime, because it's going to want something from me that I have never had to give, and it's the one thing I've never been able to threaten or pay my way through. "
She doesn't say it's going to be okay. She knows me too well to insult me with it. She just moves, comes up behind me on her knees and wraps both arms around me from the back, her cheek between my shoulder blades, holding on like she held the box, like I'm a thing she's decided is hers to carry.
"You found a kill-pen mare in another county and drove out to buy her back so I'd never have to thank you," she says into my spine.
"You taught a terrified kid to handle dogs at dawn so nobody would see you being kind.
You let a cat live in your jacket. You hold my feet in your lap while you pretend to watch the door.
" Her arms tighten. "You say you don't know how.
You've been doing it for two months, every day, in every direction but the one you'd let yourself call it.
You just never had a name for it because nobody ever gave you one. "
It takes the bottom out of me, this woman holding my back in the dark, telling me I already know how to do the one thing I've spent my life certain I couldn't.
"You're going to be a wonderful father," she says. "It's very upsetting. I've been saying it since the kitten."
"You've been needling me about the cat for a month."
"I've been telling you the truth about the cat for a month. You just heard needling because that's the only frequency you trust." She pulls back to look at me, her hands on either side of my face, fierce now, the way she gets when she's decided a thing and won't be argued off it.
"Listen to me. You're going to do the thing nobody did for you.
You already know how, because you spent your whole life knowing exactly what was missing.
You're going to give this kid everything you never got.
You're going to be a little bit insufferable about it, and I am going to love watching you do it. "
"And if I get it wrong."
"Then you get it wrong, you say sorry, you try again tomorrow.
That's the whole job, Isaak. Nobody's good at it.
The good ones are just the ones who don't quit.
" She presses her forehead to mine. "You don't quit.
It's the most annoying thing about you. You're going to be a stubborn, overprotective disaster of a father.
Our kid is going to be safer, more loved than any child has a right to be, and you're going to lose your mind over a baby the way you lost it over a popper in a cigar. "
A sound comes out of me, half a laugh, half a raw thing closer to a sob than I've made since I was a boy.
I turn around, pull her into my lap, hold her too hard, my face in her neck, and for once in my life I let a person see me undone.
She's the one who taught me that being seen isn't the same as being weak.
She's carrying my child, and I have run clean out of walls.
We stay like that a while. The clock turns past two. The kitten scratches at the door and we don't let him in.
She settles against my chest where she started the night. My heart has come back down near its ordinary rhythm. I can feel hers too, through the thin layer between us, steadier than mine, which is a fact I will live on for some time.
She smells like the lavender soap she buys in bulk because she decided once it suited her and never reconsidered.
There's the specific warmth of her, the way she's been running a few degrees hotter since sometime in the fall, the body doing what it's supposed to, putting everything toward what needs it.
I noticed it for weeks without knowing what I was noticing. Now I know.
I also know what the extra warmth has done to me every night for two months, pressed against her in the dark, and I need a moment with that fact before I say anything else.
"You can't tell anyone yet," she says against my chest, drowsy now, the adrenaline letting go of her. "Twelve weeks. We wait. That's the rule, my mother always said, you wait until twelve weeks before you let yourself believe it."
"Then we wait." I'm already past it in my head, past the waiting, into the part where I make the world safe enough to hold a child, but she doesn't need that tonight, so I keep it behind my teeth. "Who knows so far?"
"Just Grigor. He guessed. He didn't say a word, he just got this look, then he told me his sister had four and I'd be fine." She huffs a laugh into me. "Your driver has been kinder to me about this than I've been to myself."
"He'll keep it. Grigor has carried worse secrets than yours nine years and never spilled one." I press my mouth to the top of her head. "And I'll handle the rest. The household, the doctors, all of it, quietly, so nobody knows until you're ready to be known."
"And he's back." She tips her face up, finds me in the dark, half a smile in her voice even now. "I gave you a whole minute of being a person. Right on schedule, the fixer returns."
"The fixer never left. He's just decided what he's fixing now." I mean it more than anything I've said in years, and she hears it. She goes quiet and tucks herself in tighter.
The wedding night. Two weeks of a bed split down the middle, a border neither of us named. Then one night she crossed it and I had her back against the headboard before she'd finished deciding. Now there are three of them.
"Twelve weeks puts it at the wedding night," I say into her hair, doing the count. "We did this our first night."
She pulls back enough to look at me, her eyes wet and wide, her mouth gone soft with the shock of it. "Of course we did."
The one reckless thing I've allowed myself in twenty years took root the first time I let myself have her.
I put my hand flat over her stomach, where there's nothing yet to feel, and I keep it there.
Something happens in my chest that has no transaction in it at all, no price, no use, just a fierce stupid animal need to put my body between this woman and the entire world.
Right behind it, cold and clear, comes the other thing, the thing I won't say out loud tonight because tonight belongs to her.
Somebody is circling my wife. Somebody pulled the floor out from under her rescue, put a car on her, and is asking the whole city who holds her dead father's belongings.
A week ago it was a threat to the one person money couldn't replace.
Now there are two of them, and one is the size of a lime.
What I'm willing to do to keep them both breathing just expanded past anything with a limit on it, in a way that should frighten me and doesn't.
I hold my pregnant wife in the tangled sheets at two in the morning, and I make her a promise I keep silent, because she asked me to be a person tonight, not a weapon. I'll give her that, the last clean night before I become the other thing.
Tomorrow I find whoever is reaching for them.
Tomorrow I stop being careful. Whoever staged a murder to look like my world's work, whoever has been hunting my wife since before she was mine, is going to meet the version of me that the rest of the world only ever hears about secondhand, the one even Lev has only seen twice.
But that's tomorrow. Tonight I hold her, and I keep my hand flat on the place where my child is.
I let myself want something that can do nothing for me, that I can't protect by paying for it or threatening it or standing in front of it with a gun.
I have walked into rooms full of men who wanted me dead with a steadier pulse than this.
Wanting them, the two of them, with no wall up and no exit planned, is the one thing in my life I have never learned how to survive.