Page 40 of Marrying the Pakhan

She climbs into the back seat and buckles herself in with the same focused seriousness she brought to everything in those early days, and for a moment I brace myself for something worse than what she actually gives me.

“How was it?” I ask once we’re in the car.

“Fine. Grandma cried a little. Grandpa mostly just watched me color.”

“Watched you color?”

“He didn’t say much. He just watched, like he was trying to remember what I look like.” She says it matter-of-fact, the way kids report strange adult behavior without fully understanding its weight. “It was kind of weird.”

“Did they say anything else? Anything that upset you?”

“Not really. Grandma asked if I was happy. I said yes.” She shrugs, already moving past it, more interested in the radio than the conversation now that the actual event is behind her. “Can we get ice cream on the way home?”

“We’ll see.”

“That’s not a no.”

“No,” I say, echoing a phrase she’s clearly picked up from someone in this car. “It’s not.”

I glance at Viktor in the rearview mirror. His face has gone completely blank in a way I recognize now, the same stillness from the courthouse, and I file the detail away without understanding why it matters, the way I’ve apparently learned to file away half of what unsettles him.

That night, after Ginger’s down and the house has gone quiet, Viktor finds me in the kitchen, and neither of us says anything about the visitation, or the grocery store, or any of the small, ordinary moments that made up the day.

We just exist in the same space, the way we do most nights now, him reading something at the counter, me finishing paperwork from work, occasionally trading a comment about nothing that matters.

It’s not that we’re avoiding the subject exactly. It’s more that neither of us seems to need to say it out loud anymore, the way you stop narrating things once they’ve become simply true.

It hits me, watching him from across the kitchen, that I’ve stopped keeping track of where the arrangement ends and whatever this actually is begins. There isn’t a clean line between them anymore, hasn’t been for weeks, and I’m not sure either of us is in any hurry to go looking for where it used to be.

A year ago I couldn’t have imagined a version of my life that included a man like Viktor Markov standing at my kitchen counter on a Saturday night, reading something with his sleeves pushed up, entirely unremarkable in a way that used to feel impossible for anyone in my life to be.

“Bed?” he asks eventually, setting his book aside.

“In a minute.”

He kisses the top of my head on his way past, easy, unremarkable, a gesture that would have felt impossible four months ago and now barely registers as anything except ordinary.

I sit there a while longer, thinking about the way Pavel watched Ginger color, and about Viktor’s face in the rearview mirror, giving nothing away.

Whatever he’s not telling me, I’m not going to push tonight. I trust him.

Which still surprises me some days.

18

VIKTOR

Dimitri catches me on my way out of the club, phone already in hand.

“Nothing solid yet on the logistics man,” he says. “He’s cautious. Won’t meet in person, won’t talk on any line he doesn’t control himself. I’ve got someone building trust with him slowly. Could take another few weeks.”

“Keep at it. Quietly.”

“Always.” He studies me for a second longer than the update requires. “You’ve been better lately. Less on edge.”

“Things have been good.”

“I noticed.” He says it without judgment, just an observation, and lets me go without pushing further, which I’m grateful for, because I don’t have a clean way to explain to him what’s actually changed in the last few weeks, only that it has.