Page 37 of Marrying the Pakhan

“Set it up,” I say. “However long it takes. I need to know what Pavel wants before he decides to take it.”

“And if he already knows what he wants, and he’s just been waiting for the right moment?”

I don’t have an answer for that one.

16

HARPER

Renata catches me smiling at nothing again, which has apparently become a pattern worth commenting on.

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” she says, sliding a stack of registration cards across the desk toward me. “The smiling at nothing thing.”

“I’m not smiling at nothing.”

“Then what were you smiling at? Because it sure looked like nothing to me.”

I don’t have a good answer that doesn’t involve explaining an entire relationship shift I’m still getting used to myself, so I just shrug and go back to filing, and Renata lets it go for about thirty seconds before circling back anyway.

“You seem different,” she says. “Lighter. Since when?”

“Since things settled down, I guess.”

“Things settled down four months ago. This is more recent than that.” She studies me with the particular focus she usually reserves for spotting a guest trying to sneak an extra person into a single room. “Did something happen?”

“A few somethings, maybe.”

“Harper.”

“I’m not telling you anything at a hotel front desk, Renata. Some things stay private.”

She grins, delighted rather than offended, and doesn’t push further, though I catch her watching me for the rest of the shift with the satisfied expression of someone who’s already guessed correctly and is simply waiting for confirmation.

“For what it’s worth,” she says later, restocking the pen cup like it’s the most casual thing in the world, “I’m glad. Whatever it is. You deserve one thing in your life that isn’t a fight.”

“It’s not a fight. It’s just a different fight than it used to be.”

“That’s practically a confession.”

“It’s practically nothing, and I’m going back to my registration cards now.”

She laughs and lets me go, and I spend the rest of the shift with a small, stubborn smile I don’t bother trying to hide anymore, even when a guest asks if everything’s all right, concerned by a front desk employee who seems entirely too pleased about a broken ice machine on the third floor that still, four months later, nobody’s fixed.

My phone buzzes around four, a text from Denise, a reminder about the visitation schedule starting next week, the Ivanovs’ four supervised hours every other Saturday, arranged through a court-appointed monitor at a family center downtown.

I stare at the text longer than it requires. It’s routine, expected, part of the ruling from months ago that I mostly managed to put out of my mind once the case itself was settled.

Still, seeing it in writing, a real date attached to it now, sits differently than the abstract idea of visitation did back in that courtroom. I hadn’t thought much about the actual mechanics of it, Ginger sitting across a table from her grandparents in some fluorescent-lit family center, a stranger with a clipboard watching to make sure nothing goes wrong.

I text back a simple “got it, thank you,” and add a second message before I can talk myself out of it. “Does Ginger need to know ahead of time, or is it better to just tell her the day of?”

Denise responds a few minutes later. Usually better to give kids a heads up, so it doesn’t feel sudden. Up to you on timing, but I’d say sometime this week.

I put the phone away and try not to spiral about something that isn’t actually a crisis, just an appointment on a calendar, the same appointment that’s been sitting there since the ruling, waiting patiently for its date to finally arrive.

By six, my feet ache and my voice is going hoarse from a full shift of small talk, but even that feels lighter than it used to, the ordinary exhaustion of a normal day instead of the particular exhaustion of a life that used to feel like it was one bad week away from falling apart entirely.

By the time I get home, Ginger’s already had dinner with Viktor, some experiment involving a new pasta recipe that apparently went reasonably well based on the state of the kitchen.