Page 85 of Captured By the Pakhan

I can’t sleep so I get up, get dressed in the dark, and go out.

There's a twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Connecticut, four blocks away. I take the long way, both sides of the street, and I check twice, and I am clean.

I buy the test and a bottle of water and a packet of gum I don't want so it isn't the only thing on the counter, which is a habit I acquired for entirely different reasons and which is now the stupidest thing I have ever done, because the boy behind the register doesn't care about any of it.

And I cannot do it in Logan's flat.

That's the part I can't explain. There is a perfectly good bathroom on Q Street with a lock on the door and a man asleep four meters away who has known me nine years. I cannot make myself do it in there, so I walk two blocks to a gas station on Florida Avenue and use the bathroom around the side that requires a key.

Three minutes.

I sit on the floor with my back against the door because there is nowhere else to sit, the floor is filthy, and I do not care.

Two lines.

I look at it for a long time.

And here's what happens, and I want to set it down properly because it is the strangest thing that has ever happened to me: it arrives in two pieces, and they arrive at the same moment, and they do not cancel each other out. They just both sit there.

The first one is joy.

Pure, appalling, uncomplicated. I am thirty-one years old, and I have carried around the word "unlikely" since I was twenty-three like a stone in a coat pocket. I am sitting on the floor of a gas station bathroom on Florida Avenue with two blue lines in my hand, and the noise that comes out of me isn't one I have ever made.

I have a hand over my mouth for about a minute.

And underneath it, arriving at the same time, in the same breath:

His.

The man with the folder. Day two. Would cross for, in his handwriting, eleven names, and my mother on her own front step in a green coat she's had since I was in high school.

The man who watched me come back down a hill and never once said a word about it. The man who got down on the floor of his son's room because I told him to several days earlier, did it badly, and did it anyway.

Both of them. The same man. And I am sitting on a bathroom floor holding a piece of plastic that says I am carrying his child, and I cannot get the two of them into the same room in my head no matter how I turn it.

And he doesn't know where I am.

And there is a man with eleven agents, a case code who is looking for me, who wants me found in a Bratva house, and who has now put a welfare check on my mother's front door.

I sit on that floor for eleven minutes.

Then I put the test in the pocket of my coat, and I get up, and something in me goes very quiet and very organized.

Right. Well. That's the arithmetic changed.

I get back to Q Street at ten past two, and Logan hasn't moved.

I don't sleep. I sit at the end of the couch in the dark and start building the version of the next four days that has three people in it instead of one. It goes badly, because every single route I can construct starts with getting a message to a man whose telephone number I do not have, in a house I could not find on a map, two and a half thousand miles away.

Yeremey. I don't have him either.

The freight company. Yaroslav Freight has a switchboard, eleven hundred employees, and a compliance record; I could stand in a phone box on Connecticut Avenue tomorrow morning and ask to be put through to the chief executive, and I would be the four hundredth crank of the week.

Unless you say a thing only three people know.

I sit up.

Because there is a sentence, there is a single phrase I could give to a switchboard operator that would be on his desk in less than ten minutes: ‘the onions were too big’.