Page 21 of Marrying the Pakhan

“You didn’t have to come do this yourself.”

“I have people who could have. I wanted to.”

His house sits behind a gate that opens on its own when we pull up, with a long driveway, more windows than any house needs, and a quiet so complete it feels engineered rather than accidental.

There’s a man near the garage who nods at Viktor and doesn’t ask a single question about the boxes or the six-year-old climbing out of the back seat, which strikes me as slightly odd before I decide it’s just how rich people’s staff behave, invisible and unbothered by anything.

Another man I haven’t seen before is doing something at the far end of the driveway that looks less like landscaping and more like checking the tree line.

“This is it,” Viktor says, watching my face for a reaction as we step inside a few minutes later.

I do my best to take it all in. “It’s… a lot of house.”

“It’ll feel smaller once you’re both actually living in it.”

I doubt that, standing in a foyer with ceilings twice as tall as any room I’ve ever slept in, but I don’t say so.

Ginger doesn’t say much of anything. She’s been quiet the whole drive over, quieter than usual even for her, and she stays close to my leg while Viktor shows us the rooms, her hand fisted in the hem of my shirt like she’s worried letting go might mean losing me somewhere in the house.

She still has the rabbit tucked under one arm, and every so often her fingers find its ear and worry the fabric there, an old habit I remember from right after Mia died, one I hoped we’d left behind for good.

Her new room is bigger than our old living room, a bed already made up in soft yellow sheets someone clearly picked with a six-year-old in mind, and she stands in the doorway looking at it like it belongs to somebody else.

“Do you like it?” I ask.

She shrugs, small, noncommittal, the same shrug she’s given every question for three days now.

“You can pick different sheets if you want. These don’t have to be permanent.”

“It’s fine,” she says, which is what she’s said about everything since Tuesday.

That night, after most of the boxes are unpacked and the yellow sheets are still untouched because Ginger insisted on sleeping in her clothes on top of the covers, I find her sitting on the floor of her new room instead of the bed, back against the wall, knees pulled up.

“Hey,” I say, sitting down next to her. “You okay down here?”

“I don’t know where anything is.”

“That’s okay. It’s new. Nobody knows where anything is on the first night.”

“What if I need you and I can’t find your room?”

My heart breaks a little. “My room’s right down the hall. Second door. I’ll show you again before bed, as many times as you need.”

She nods, but she doesn’t move off the floor, and I sit with her there instead of pushing.

Viktor appears in the doorway a few minutes later, a glass of water in each hand, and he doesn’t ask why we’re on the floor.

He just crouches down to Ginger’s level, sets one glass beside her, and stays there.

“First night in a new house is the strangest one,” he says. “After that it gets easier. I promise.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve done it. More than once.” He says it simply.

“Did you get scared?”

“Every time.” He doesn’t make it sound braver than it was. “Being scared in a new place doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with you. It just means you haven’t learned the layout yet.”