Page 48 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
There was the smallest quiet on her end. I heard a fork against a plate, a chair leg, Mr. Halverson asking who in his low courtroom voice.
"Chloe. You take care of yourself. You come back when you can. The boys will miss you. Thank you for everything you have done in this house."
The phone went warm against my ear. I made the breath go in through my nose so the next word would have a floor under it.
"Thank you."
"You call when you can. Go."
I hung up. I set the phone face down on my thigh. I sat with the weight of it on my leg for a long beat with my eyes on the dark window where the bare branch of the gingko outside cut the streetlight into pieces.
Then I got up. I packed a small overnight bag. I put the pendant on its chain around my neck for the first time since Jacob had pressed it into my palm at the restaurant and closed my fingers around it himself. The metal went under the collar of my shirt and lay flat against my skin in the hollow between my collarbones. It was cold at first. Then it warmed.
The gravel under the cab tires the next morning was the same gravel I had heard twice before. The willow at the bend of the fieldstone wall was bare in the cold, its long thin branches moving in the small wind off the river. I had the overnight bag on my shoulder and the pendant warm against the inside of my collarbone where it had been for the whole length of the train ride up. I'd put my hand on it twice through the wool of my shirt and made myself put my hand back down.
The cab dropped me at the front of the house. I paid him. I stood with my bag at my feet and looked up at the door.
The door opened before my foot was on the top step.
Lily, Jade, and Sienna were on the threshold together. Three pairs of arms again, the way they had been on the bank of the upstate road three months back, except this time they came down the steps to me and this time they held on longer because they had been waiting for me to come back through this door. Lily hugged hard. She had the small strong arms of a woman who had stood at a barre for twenty years and they closed around my back like a brace. Jade pressed her cheek to the side of my head and held it there. Sienna did the squeeze with both hands at the tops of my arms and let go.
I pulled back. I wiped under my eyes with the side of my thumb.
"Where is he?"
"Having lunch with the girl," Jade said. "We told him he is meeting Rhea's new nanny in a few minutes. We did not tell him your name."
"Has he asked?"
"Once," Sienna said. "Mikhail told him the truth that day was already large enough."
I took one breath I had not known I had been holding.
Lily lifted her hand to the side of my face. Her palm was warm and a little rough at the heel from the garden.
"He won't know you yet. The body will know you first. It always does. The heart is not far behind it."
I nodded once because the words I had ready in my mouth were not the right size for the moment.
They walked me down the long hall. The dark wood under my boots, the row of small framed black and white pictures on the wall, the smell of soup from the kitchen, garlic and broth and something green simmering low. Rhea's voice came around the corner of the dining-room doorway, talking low and serious to her bear about a bus and a man who had let her on without a ticket. The closer I got to the doorway the more my own legs felt borrowed.
I came through the doorway. I stopped one half step inside it.
He was sitting at the head of the long table with Rhea on the chair to his right. He was in a soft black shirt with the sleeves pushed back to the elbow. His hair was shorter than I had ever seen it, cut close at the sides and only a little longer on top, and the new line of it showed the shape of his skull in a way the longer cut had not. There was a small fading bruise along the side of his jaw I had not known about. He was laughing low at something Rhea had just said about her bear. The laugh wassmaller than the one I remembered from the morning he had cooked eggs for me in my apartment. The two-note shape of it was still there.
He looked up.
He saw me.
The face I had been kissing inside my own head for ninety nights was looking at me from across a room with the polite open look a man gives a woman he is about to meet for the first time. The eyes were the same. The mouth was the same. The man behind them did not know my name.
He stood.
"Daniil," Sienna said, her voice level and warm at the back of my shoulder. "This is Chloe. She is the nanny we were telling you about."
He crossed the floor to me. His body moved a half-beat faster than his face did, the way a body moves when something under the floor of the head has noticed a thing the head has not. He stopped two steps from me. He put his right hand out.
I put mine in his.
