Page 55 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

She doesn’t ask if I’m alright. She’s a doctor; she can see I’m not. My heart clenches into a fist as I wonder what else she sees. Either way, I know Yulia has too much tact and class to confront me with a diagnosis anyway. That isn’t her style.

She just moves her feet to make room, and I sink into the other end of the loveseat, and for a few minutes we simply exist in the same space, which is something Yulia is extraordinarily good at.

Then she asks, sweetly, “Do you want to talk, or do you want to sit?”

I consider it.

I consider it like I’ve considered the eleven times I’ve picked up my phone and put it back down, and the way I’ve been haunting this house for three days, full of something I haven’t been able to put down or carry properly. I consider the fact that Yulia is a doctor, a mother, and a woman who came into this family from the outside and made it her own through sheer force of love and competence. That she is, of all the people in this house, the one most likely to understand.

“I’m pregnant,” I exhale.

The words seem to expand and stretch and fill up the whole room.

And then, just a beat after, my sister-in-law’s face does something I wasn’t prepared for. It lights up. Completely, unguardedly, with the kind of effusive joy that arrives before a person can even consciously decide how they feel about something—the involuntary kind, the uncomplicated kind.

She closes her medical journal with a deafening slap of pages. She reaches across the loveseat and takes both my hands in hers. And she says, so tenderly, “Darya,” and pulls me into a hug.

It rips me open at the heart. Personally, I blame the hug.

I don’t know why. I’ve been hugged plenty over the past three days—by Janella, by Iosif, by Miron, who is terrible at it and pats my back like he’s burping an infant, by Trifon, who held on long enough that I had to be the one to pull away first. But something about Yulia’s hug—about the way I can feel her smiling against my hair, and I know that the smile is for me, for this news, for the mere fact of it—something about it breaks open in my chest.

Everything inside me floods out, like a broken dam.

I burst into tears.

How fucking mortifying.

Completely, catastrophically mortifying.

I sob helplessly into the shoulder of my sister-in-law’s blouse, ugly crying, the graceless kind with sounds involved, and I cannot seem to stop. She doesn’t let go. She just holds on and lets me, which is somehow simultaneously the kindest and most devastating thing she could do.

“Is this the hormones?” I manage, between what I can only describe as sobs. “Is this what the next eight months are going to be like? Because I have to tell you, I find this extremely objectionable.”

Yulia laughs into my cheek and gives me a comforting squeeze.

“Sometimes,” she admits. “But I do wonder if that’s all it is.”

She’s right. I know she’s right, because I know exactly what this is. It crystallizes in the middle of my crying, with the horrible clarity that tends to arrive at the worst possible moments: I know why I’m crying. I know what I needed, and what I didn’t get, and I know that Yulia’s face—her open, uncomplicated joy over a piece of news that scares the shit out of me—is the face I’d wanted to see on Anton.

It’s the reassurance I’d needed.

That’s what this is.

That’s all this is. I’m sad. I’m so, so sad, and exhausted, and disappointed, because I wanted to trust him and he’d shown me why I’d been right to keep him at arm’s length. He’d proven my worst fear right.

I hadn’t known, until he asked me what I wanted to do about it, how badly I’d needed him to be happy. Hadn’t known, until the ground dropped out from under me in that office, that the idea of anything other than the three of us—Anton and me and this baby, a family, improbable and chaotic and entirely unplanned—had simply never occurred to me.

Tears aren’t the only thing that pour out of me. The truth does, too. Some of it, at least. I don’t have the words for all of it yet, and some of it belongs to Anton and me before it belongs to anyone else. I hate, more than anything, that any part of this history he and I have been writing together still feels sacred to me.

I can barely stand to tell her about the happenings of the evening; it all went wrong: the text exchange, and the dinner, and how he’d defended me to Boris with more heat than I’d ever heard him use with anyone.

I tell her about the office, and the mezcal I didn’t take, and the specific hollowness of his voice when he’d asked me what I wanted to do about it. I tell her—and this is the part that costs me the most, the part I have to look at my own hands to say—that I’d spent two weeks carrying this alone because some part of me had been waiting for the right moment, and that the right moment I’d been imagining had looked nothing like what actually happened.

In the right moment, he would have laughed jubilantly and looked at me with a broad, sparkling grin. He’d have reached for me instead of pulling away. Grabbed me instead of whiskey.

“I wanted him to be glad,” I say, and the plainness of it, out loud, is almost unbearable.

Yulia is quiet for a moment. It feels like the moment of silence people preserve for those who have died.