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Elara tries to make her eat toast and fails. Galina brings tea. The tea goes cold. Eventually Elara takes Anya upstairs and stays with her until she falls asleep.

I don’t follow.

If I go upstairs now, I’ll ask questions Elara is not ready to answer. I will ask them badly. I will ask them like a man who has spent the last few hours being angry at her, then afraid for her, then angrier because I don’t know what to do with the fear.

So, I stay in my office and give Sergei instructions.

I need to find everything about Evan, even though I don’t have his last name yet. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll destroy him.

By midnight, the house is quiet.

I have not read a single line on the screen in front of me. I have sat there for an hour thinking about Elara’s face when I said she was not Anya’s mother, then thinking about her face outside that townhouse when she looked at me like she didn’t know whether I was safety or another danger.

That thought keeps me in my chair longer than anything else.

Eventually, I stand. I tell myself I am checking on Anya. That would be reasonable. Instead, I end up in the hallway outside Elara’s room.

She isn’t there at first.

Her door is partly open, the room dark except for one lamp near the bed. I should leave. I should go to my own room and wait until morning, when she has slept, when I have slept, when I can speak like a man with some control over himself.

Then I hear quiet steps from the other end of the hall.

She appears from the direction of Anya’s room, wearing a robe tied at her waist, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looks tired. Smaller than she did this afternoon. My coat is gone, but I can still see the mark on her wrist.

She stops when she sees me. For a few seconds, neither of us speaks.

“I checked on Anya,” she says finally.

“I know.”

“She was asleep.”

“I know.”

Elara nods once and reaches for her door.

I should let her go inside. I knock anyway.

It’s a stupid thing to do, because she is standing right there with the door already half open, but my hand moves before I can decide against it.

She looks at my knuckles against the wood, then at me.

The absurdity of it almost reaches her face.

I drop my hand. “This is a bad idea,” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

Neither of us moves.

I look at her wrist again.

Her sleeve has slipped back enough for me to see the red marks clearly. They are darker now, bruising at the edges.

My jaw tightens.

She notices. “It doesn’t hurt much.”