Page 9 of Marrying the Pakhan

“That was fast,” I say.

“You said tomorrow.” He drops the folder on the desk in front of me and takes the chair across from it without being asked, which means this conversation isn’t over as quickly as he’d like me to think. “Harper Wilcox. Twenty-eight. Front desk at the Ashcombe downtown, been there three years. No record, no debt beyond a car loan, rent’s current. Parents deceased. One sister, also deceased, which is apparently where the custody case comes in.”

I open the folder. The first page is exactly what he described: flat and clinical, a report that could apply to half the women in this city.

“Sister’s daughter,” Dimitri continues. “Six years old. The girl’s paternal grandparents, an older couple named Ivanov, filed for custody a few months back. Harper’s fighting it. Nothing dramatic in the filings, just a standard dispute. Money, stability, the usual arguments people make against a single guardian.”

“Ivanov.” I turn the name over once, out loud, and nothing about it catches. Common enough surname, and nothing in the report ties it to anything I’d recognize. “You’re sure there’s nothing else there?”

“Grieving grandparents trying to keep their granddaughter. That’s the whole story, as far as I can find.” He shrugs. “I didn’t dig past the court filings. You said full background on her, not a file on people she’s suing.”

“Fine.” I flip through the rest of it while he watches, waiting for a reaction he isn’t getting. Bank statements, a copy of her lease, a printout of the guardianship paperwork with her signature at the bottom.

“You want me to keep pulling on it? The grandparents, I mean.” Dimitri leans back. “Given who we are, I’d rather over check than under check.”

“Not yet. This is enough for now.”

“That’s new. You usually want everything twice over before you sign your name to anything.”

“This isn’t a business deal.”

“No,” he says, standing, “it’s stranger than that, and you still haven’t told me why.”

I don’t answer, and he doesn’t push.

He leaves the folder on the desk and heads back out to the floor, and I hear the door click shut behind him, and then it’s just me and a stranger’s entire life sitting flat on my desk in a manila folder.

There’s nothing dramatic about them either. A few pulled from what must be a social media account that went quiet years ago, one from an old work event at the hotel, staff lined up in matching uniforms, and Harper somewhere near the end of the row, laughing at something outside the frame.

She looks different, lit up like that. Lighter. Nothing like the woman who walked up to me last night with her hands shaking and her voice completely steady.

There’s a picture near the bottom, just her at a coffee shop table, head tilted, mid-laugh, hair falling loose instead of pulled back the way it was in the hallway. Another one shows her crouched next to a small girl on a swing set, one hand braced on the chain, both of them mid motion, blurred slightly at the edges.

I find myself looking at the line of her jaw in the first one longer than I mean to. The curve of her mouth caught mid-laugh.

The way her whole face changes when nothing in it is working to convince anyone of anything.

It’s a strange thing, wanting to know more about someone whose entire value to me was supposed to be how little she’d actually change my life. A signature. A photograph for the courthouse steps.

Nothing that should require this much of my attention, this many minutes spent on paper that was only ever meant to answer one simple question, whether she was safe to marry.

She is. That question’s been answered for an hour now.

I think about the hallway again. The quiet. The way she said her own name, waited for me to answer, extended her hand like the whole thing might fall apart if I refused to shake it.

I think about the shape of her standing there, arms crossed loosely, working up her nerve before she’d even opened her mouth, and the way her voice went steady the second she started talking business, like nerves were a luxury she couldn’t afford once the stakes were real. None of that should be doing what it’s currently doing to me.

I close the folder, get up, and walk to the window that looks out over the parking lot. It does not help. I still cannot get her out of my head. The shake of her hand. The line of her throat when she swallowed hard enough to steady herself.

I have spent fifteen years training myself not to want things I have not earned the right to want.

What the fuck is wrong with you? I think. She came to you for help, not to be jerked off to like some pervert in your own office.

I clench my jaw and head downstairs instead. The club is already packed.

Heavy bass vibrates through the floor as colored lights sweep across the main stage.

On the pole, a tall brunette with long wavy hair and glitter-covered skin spins slowly upside down, her legs spread wide in a perfect split. She’s completely naked except for a tiny rhinestone thong that barely covers anything.