CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nadia — The Distance I Choose
I gave myself a week. I don’t know why a week felt like the right unit of time to process the fact that my dead mother had stolen a decade of a criminal empire’s secrets to buy me a childhood, or that the man who’d been watching me sleep through curtained windows for four years was the son of the man she’d stolen it from — but a week was what I gave myself, and I spent most of it failing to use it well.
I went back to work, because work was the only thing that had ever reliably organized my mind when everything else refused to.
Marguerite noticed something was wrong and, mercifully, didn’t push, just kept handing me cups of coffee like caffeine was a substitute for conversation, which some days it almost was.
“You’ve been staring at that corner for ten minutes,” she said on Wednesday, nodding at the pier painting, the low-tide one, the one that had started all of this without either of us knowing it yet.
“Just thinking.”
“About the buyer who never followed through? I finally released the hold, by the way. Whoever it was stopped answering calls two weeks ago.”
I hadn’t known that. I filed it away with everything else I was filing away that week — small facts that felt like they mattered, in a story I was only beginning to understand had many more moving pieces than the two men currently occupying my thoughts.
Priya, for her part, had appointed herself my chief of security in a way that was equal parts comforting and exhausting.
She’d researched self-defense classes. She’d found me a locksmith who specialized in “actual security, not landlord security,” her words, and installed a second deadbolt on my door before I’d even agreed to it.
“You don’t have to do all this,” I told her, the third night in a row she’d shown up at my apartment with takeout and a list of things she’d looked into.
“I do, actually, because you clearly have a pattern of falling for men who are dangerous to be around, and someone in this friendship has to be the one who reads the statistics.” She said it lightly, but there was real worry underneath it, worry I recognized because I’d been carrying a version of it myself.
“I’m not saying don’t see him again. I’m saying don’t let the fact that he’s tragic make you forget he’s also the reason you’ve spent two years — sorry, two weeks — jumping every time a car slows down near you. ”
She wasn’t wrong, and I told her so, and we didn’t talk about it again that night, which was its own kind of mercy.
The distance I’d asked for didn’t feel like the clean break I’d expected.
I found myself doing the thing I’d done before I knew his name — checking the street before I closed my blinds, half hoping to catch a shape in the dark that would mean he was still out there, still keeping whatever version of his promise he thought he owed me.
Some nights the street was empty and I told myself that was a relief.
Some nights it was empty and I felt something closer to loss, which I didn’t examine too closely because I didn’t like what I suspected I’d find.
He didn’t contact me. That, more than anything else, was what finally started shifting something in me — not forgiveness, not yet, but a kind of grudging respect for a man who had spent four years inserting himself into every corner of my life and was now, apparently, capable of leaving me alone the moment I actually asked him to.
It was Elias Vane who broke the silence first, and not with a card this time.
He called the gallery directly, and Marguerite handed me the phone with a look that said she’d ask questions later, and I heard his voice, unhurried as ever, say, “I hope Mr. Sorokin’s confession was everything you were hoping for.”
My stomach dropped. “How do you know about that.”
“Ms. Kessler, I make it my business to know things. It’s rather the whole of what I do.
” A pause, and I could hear, underneath the practiced calm, something that might have been genuine urgency for the first time since I’d met him.
“I’m going to give you a piece of information he almost certainly didn’t, because it’s not flattering to him, and I suspect he’d rather you never learn it.
The files your mother took — the ones everyone still wants — Kael Sorokin has known where they are for the better part of a year. ”
The floor tilted under me again, the way it had outside the storage unit, the way it seemed to every time one of these two men decided to hand me a piece of the truth shaped exactly to serve whatever he wanted from me next.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “He would have told me.”
“Would he?” Vane’s voice was almost gentle, which was somehow the worst version of it.
“Ask yourself, Ms. Kessler, why a man who’s spent four years watching over you has never once asked you the one question that would end all of this — where your mother might have hidden what she took.
Ask yourself what it means that he already knows the answer, and has simply chosen, for reasons of his own, not to use it yet. ”
He hung up before I could respond, the way he always did, leaving me holding a piece of information I didn’t want and couldn’t verify and could not, no matter how hard I tried in the hours that followed, entirely dismiss.