Page 54 of Cruel Demands

“Nothing. When the guards asked for identification, they smiled. One of them said they had only come to make certain Nikita Koroleva was being looked after properly.”

My vision narrows. They know her name. My family name. Her pharmacy. Which entrance serves her wing. Only a handful of men knew the driver had been taken. If Orlov had answered before breakfast, one of the six had spoken.

“What else did they say?”

“They said I should be proud. That my son is becoming a very important man.” She breathes in shakily. “They said important men make important enemies.” I say nothing because there is nothing useful to say. If I speak too quickly, she will hear it all in my mouth even if I lie. She will hear the truth of who I am. She heard it often enough in her husband. She knows what it sounds like. “Misha.”

“I will handle it.”

“No.” Her voice cracks. “No more handling. You said you were done, Misha. You are governor now. You have built a respectable life. Do not risk it, my love.”

This is not new. My mother has always hated that word from me.

Handle. Fix. Manage. All the small, clean words men use so women do not hear the uglier ones beneath.

My reflection stares back at me from the glass window, streaked with fingerprints and dust. Forty-three years old. Suit perfect. Face calm. A boy in a hallway, listening to his mother cry behind a locked door.

“What do you want me to say?” I ask.

“I want you to stop.”

The word sits between us.

Outside my office, people move through hallways and sit at desks doing work they believe is legitimate, lending legitimacy to me in the process. Taylor is being shown how the telephone works and where the office calendar is. She might think I am a bad man because I used her and threw her out, but she does not know she is in danger if I keep her.

My mother knows. She asks me to stop, and if I had any sense of decency left, I would.

For her. For Taylor. For the rest of them.

“Stop what?” I ask, though I know. The question itself is a lie.

My mother exhales a small, broken sound. “Do not do that to me.”

“Mama—”

“You are lying,” she says. I don’t answer. “You have been lying to me for—you may have never told me the truth. You may have never told Moscow the truth. You smile for newspapers. You stand beside clean men in clean suits. You say words like reform and stability and responsibility. But men still come to my gate.”

“I cannot control every man who wants to frighten me.”

“No,” she says. “But they knew where to find your mother.”

I turn from the window. On my desk, the intern packet sits beside a briefing folder filled with donor names, district maps, and polling numbers. The respectable machinery of power.

My mother speaks again, softer now. “Are you a dirty politician?”

The question is so absurd that for one second I almost laugh. Then I hear what she’s really asking. Are you your father in a better suit?

“No,” I say.

“Misha.”

“I am not.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“You know God hears you.”