Page 105 of Captured By the Pakhan

"There is one item that isn't in there," he says, "because I want to hand it to you rather than let you find it. The man who took the pictures is called Adam Vasquez; he works out of Silver Spring, and his details are in the envelope on the top. He has been paid, he doesn't know your name, and he has taken photographs of your mother every Wednesday for weeks."

I stand in the kitchen and put both hands flat on the counter.

"I'm going to burn it," I say.

"Yes."

"Not because it's finished."

"No."

"I want to be clear about that." I look up. "I'm burning it because I don't want to own it, and because I've realized that if it exists then some version of me is going to keep going back to look at it. It's not absolution. You don't get absolution out of a fire."

"I have never once asked you for absolution," Ilya says. "I asked to be in the room."

We burn it in the fire pit on the terrace at seven on a Sunday evening. It takes forty minutes because a document that thick doesn't burn well, and we have to keep breaking it up with a poker. At some point, the sheer inconvenience of it becomes funny, and we both end up laughing about something that isn't remotely funny.

The last thing to go is the photograph of my mother at my father's grave.

I hold it for a while.

"She's going to want to meet you," I say. "She's going to be appalling about it. She's going to ask you what your intentions are, in those words, and then she's going to show you a photograph of me at fourteen with a fringe."

"I would like that a very great deal."

"You say that now."

I put it in the fire.

That night I go and find him in the study, which nobody uses any more because the door doesn't lock, the keypad has been taken off the wall, and there is a hole in the plaster where it was, and he hasn't fixed it.

"I want to ask you for something," I say.

He puts the book down.

"All right."

"And I want to do the asking, because you've done it every single time, and I've been thinking about that for about a month." I stay in the doorway. "That night in the wax. You made me go upstairs and sit on a bed for eleven minutes because you didn't want a yes I'd give in a mood."

"I remember."

"So this one's mine." I fold my arms. "I want both of them. The wax and the feather. Wax first."

He doesn't say anything for a moment, and I watch a great many things happen behind his face.

"You know what that is," he says.

"I've been thinking about it for four weeks."

"Say it, then, so that we are both in the same room."

"After the wax I've got nothing left." My voice is less shaky than I expected. "Last time, when you put your hands on me at the end, a palm was nearly too much. So doing the feather afterward, over the top of that — " I stop. "That's not more of the same thing. That's the opposite thing, and I won't be able to brace for it, because there won't be anything left to brace with."

"No," Ilya agrees. "There won't."

"I know."

"And you've thought about the pregnancy."