Page 150 of Sexting the Pakhan

I want to ask how she slept.

I want to ask a hundred things I have no right to ask in her living room while my blood is still in the bandage and her daughters are arguing about cereal in the kitchen.

So I say nothing.

Zoya rubs a hand over her face, then turns toward the kitchen. “Don’t move,” she says.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

She gives my leg a pointed look. “Good. For once, keep making sense.”

Then she leaves.

I sit back against the pillow and listen to her speak to the girls in the kitchen, low and tired and patient. Breakfast is cereal, toast, cut fruit, and a level of negotiation I have not seen outside hostage talks.

Mila wants the pink bowl because “it makes cereal taste happier.” Nadia says bowls do not affect taste, then takes the blue one because “it has better depth.” Zoya makes coffee with one hand and cuts bananas with the other, her hair still loose, her face tired in the morning light.

I sit on the couch with my injured leg stretched out, useless and inconvenient.

Zoya doesn’t look at me unless she has to. She moves around the kitchen like she belongs to every corner of it. The girls talk over each other, and she answers both without missing a step.

“Mama, Nadia took the last big strawberry,” Mila says.

Nadia says, “It wasn’t assigned.”

Zoya puts another strawberry on Mila’s plate. “There. Crisis resolved.”

Mila looks pleased. “Thank you.”

Nadia scowls, clearly displeased.

Zoya points the knife at her mildly. “Eat your breakfast, tiny lawyer.”

Nadia does.

I watch Zoya wipe a drop of milk from the counter with her wrist because her hands are full, and something inside me twists hard.

For six years, I thought I had sent her away.

Cruel, yes. Necessary, I told myself. Better for her, I told myself.

But she was there all along. In my phone. In the dark. In every message I answered when I should have slept. In every night I told myself the woman on the other side was only a stranger with a clever mouth and a lonely heart. I talked to her when she was tired. When she was angry. When she wanted comfort and refused to call it that.

And the other messages.

The ones I shouldn’t think about with her daughters sitting across from me eating cereal.

The things she asked for.

The things I told her I would do if she were in front of me.

My eyes move to the kitchen table before I can stop them.

For one short, brutal second, I see it too clearly. Zoya on this table, her hair loose under my hand, her mouth open against mine, every year between us burned down to nothing.

Then Mila says, “Why are you staring at Mama’s toast?”

Zoya freezes near the counter.