Page 61 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“I appreciate your concern,” I say. Smooth. Even. I’m proud of myself for never relinquishing the reins to this man. I’m even prouder that my courteous nature doesn’t dilute my dislike. It’s a talent to walk a tightrope like this, and I can do it. “I’ll be sure to take it under advisement.”

Chapter 22 - Anton

She’ll come home. She has to.

That’s what I tell myself, pulling on my jacket in the grey half-light of yet another morning that has no Darya in it. No coffee prepared the way she takes it. No sections of the newspaper are divided with that particular efficiency she deploys even for small things, as if disorder in any form is a personal affront to her refined sensibilities. There is no rousing click-clack of her high-heels on the hardwood floor, the gait of which I’ve apparently memorized, that follows me into my yearnful dreams, and the awful replays of the living nightmare where I told her to walk away from me and she fucking listened.

She’ll come home, I tell myself, and I’ll explain. That’s all I have to do; I have to put a hand over my heart, and I have to tell her the truth. I have to admit to her what I know, and have been afraid for her to know too. I’ve rehearsed a hundred times—a thousand times—version after version of an explanation, delivered clearly and without the kind of emotional catastrophizing that had apparently seized me in that office and rendered me useless to her when she needed me not to be.

I’ll lay it all out for her.

I’ll lay myself fucking bare.

She’s a logical woman. The most logical woman I’ve ever encountered, in fact. She’ll understand me. Whether I’ve deserved it or not, she’s the one who’s seen me. Who has taken the time to memorize me. She’ll see the shape of it, the why of it, even if she doesn’t forgive it immediately, because that’s who she is. She processes, assesses, and dissects with the eye of a restorer.

She earns her livelihood, drawing conclusions from evidence rather than feeling.

She’ll understand.

I’m almost certain she’ll understand.

She has to.

***

This mole—and I use the term as a placeholder, because I’m no longer certain it’s one fucking person doing this much goddamn damage—is a ghost.

I’ve run blind tests through four separate channels, each one isolated and traceable; if the information surfaces anywhere, it shouldn’t. So far, nothing has surfaced. Either the mole is laying low—spooked by the witch-hunt he or she must know is underway, as was always an acknowledged risk when we picked the strategy—or he’s more patient than I’ve given him credit for, or, and this is the possibility that sits worst with me, he’s inside a circle I haven’t thought to test yet. A circle that’s close enough that it would be impugning something sacrosanct to level an accusation at it.

The kind that, if it turns out to be true, will require me to do something I won’t enjoy doing. And won’t that just be my fucking luck at this point.

One night, I returned home with nothing at all. Just when I think that’s the lesser evil, I come home the next night with worse than nothing: a brigadier I’d considered a candidate who I’ve had to clear, not for being a mole but for buckling under the pressure and confessing to sampling the drug stock en route to New York, which means I have to start over on that particular thread and I have to reorganize the crew under him. This is hardly the time to be promoting one of these fuckheads, let alone hiring someone external to take over when everything is in dire straits.

The night after that, I feel the need to sit in my car in the driveway for the better part of an hour, so I can pretend I’ll go inside and Darya will be there. Just to have something to look forward to.

This isn’t productive. I know it isn’t productive or healthy.

But Darya’s absence has a texture to it that’s different from any absence I’ve experienced in this house, and I’m finding that I can’t quite prepare myself for it in the four minutes it takes to walk from the garage to the front door. So, pathetically idling it is.

It isn’t much of a comfort either that Anastasia is in the hallway when I do go in, coming from the direction of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand. She takes one look at me and looks, almost comically, like she’s trying to swallow her tongue. I appreciate the restraint.

Well, I appreciate it right up until she says, “She’s not going to just come back, you know.”

“I know,” I say.

“Do you?”

All I can do is sigh and not walk up to the roof just to leap from it. That would be too theatrical, even for me.

***

I’ve been telling myself, with the conviction of a man who has made a career out of being right, that Darya will arrive at the logical conclusion. That she’ll weigh it up—the marriage, the alliance, the baby, the life we’ve been quietly building inside this manor without either of us naming it as such—and she’ll see that the sensible next step is to come home and have the conversation. Surely, after everything, she knows I’m not a man who meant to wound her. I adore her. She has to know that.

But here’s the problem with that reasoning, and it takes me an embarrassingly long time to locate it: Darya isn’t making a logical decision. She’s sitting with a wound. And a wound doesn’t respond to logic. A wound responds to the person who caused it, showing up and being willing to bleed a little themselves.

I know this.

Of course, I know this.