Page 52 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
I choose it again in the morning when I wake up, find my way to the kitchen, and stand in front of a coffee machine with more settings than my first car, and spend four minutes figuring out how to make it produce something drinkable.
Roman is already gone.
I know this not because he told me his schedule last night, but because I have been managing his schedule for two years, and I know that he’s in the office by seven thirty on Saturdays when there is council business pending, and there is always council business pending.
His cup is in the drying rack beside the sink, rinsed and upturned, and the kitchen is clean and quiet and smells faintly of his coffee and his cologne. I stand at the counter with my own cup and I look at the city through the kitchen window and I think, with the clarity of a Saturday morning, that my life looks nothing like it did a week ago.
I set up at the long dining table with my laptop and my phone and the forwarded correspondence that has been accumulating since yesterday afternoon, and I work the way I always work, methodically and without interruption, because Roman’s professional life does not pause for his personal one, and by extension, neither does mine.
It is strange to do this here after two years of sitting outside his office door.
I draft three responses to correspondence that came in overnight, flag two items for Roman’s attention, confirm aTuesday meeting with a note that his wife will be managing his schedule remotely until further notice, and then I stop and look at what I just typed.
His wife.
I close that email and open the next one.
The man arrives at eleven.
He is one of Roman’s, I know this the moment the door staff calls up to announce him, and he comes through the penthouse entrance. He is carrying a sealed envelope that needs to go directly to Roman, and since Roman is not here, he is apparently going to leave it with me.
He’s maybe forty, broad, with the kind of face that has seen things and stopped being surprised by them, and he looks at me when I open the door with an expression that moves from expectation to something else in the space of half a second.
“I’m here for Mr. Petrov,” he says.
“He’s not in. I can take that for him.”
He looks at me. Then he looks past me into the penthouse, a slow, deliberate look that takes in the laptop on the dining table, the coffee cup, and my lack of shoes, and he looks back at me.
“I’ll come back,” he says.
“I’m his wife,” I say. “I can take the envelope.”
He holds the envelope out without a word, and I take it, and he looks at me one more time, the same look, unhurried and assessing, and then he turns and goes back to the elevator.
I close the door.
I stand in the entrance hall with the envelope in my hand and I look at the middle distance and I breathe slowly through my nose. I remind myself that I have stood in rooms full of Roman Petrov’s associates for two years and I have never once given any of them the satisfaction of seeing anything on my face that I didn’t put there deliberately.
I put the envelope on the table next to my laptop.
I go back to work.
I make it forty minutes before I pick up my phone and call Mara. She answers on the second ring, her voice that of someone who has been waiting for this call.
“Tell me everything,” she says.
So I do. I tell her about the coffee machine and the ceiling and the sheets and the dining table and working in my silk blouse with no shoes.
I tell her about the lobby downstairs with the men who look at everyone who comes through the door like they are already running a calculation about them. I tell her about the envelope man, the look he gave me, and the way he saidI’ll come back, like I was a piece of furniture he had not been informed would be there.
“He sounds like a nightmare,” Mara says.
“He was perfectly polite.”
“The politely dismissive ones are the worst kind.”
“I know.”
