Page 191 of Sexting the Pakhan

I sit alonefor a long time after she leaves the room.

The cottage is quiet in the way only places with sleeping children can be quiet. Not empty. Not peaceful exactly. Just full of small breathing lives behind thin walls and the knowledge that one noise too loud will wake them all.

My daughters.

Even in my own head, the words do not sit normally.

I never thought I would have a child.

Men like me do not build their lives around children. We inherit enemies before we inherit furniture. We learn early that loving anything too openly gives other people somewhere to aim. I watched my father treat family like territory, not tenderness. I told myself I would be better by simply being colder.

Now I have two girls with my eyes and Zoya’s mouth and the undeniable proof that they belong to me.

It does terrify me. It also makes something harder and stranger move through my chest every time I think of them.

I picture Mila half on top of me on the couch, warm and unafraid, telling me not to die. I picture Nadia with her frog book and her narrow stare, measuring me like a problem she intended to solve eventually. I picture Zoya in the grocery aisle dropping pasta because a stranger said the girls looked like me, and that was the moment my life divided into before and after.

Two daughters.

Five years old.

Years I missed because I thought letting her go was mercy.

The more I think about it, the uglier it becomes.

I push myself up from the chair, leg stiff and angry, and stand still for a second until the room steadies. The shower is running down the hall.

Zoya.

Of course she’s the thing my mind reaches for next. Not the men trying to kill me. Not the leak in my circle. Not the list of names I need to tear apart. Her.

The messages start playing in my head before I even reach the bathroom door.

Are you awake?

Tell me what you want.

I’m touching myself.

I picture her writing those words with my daughters asleep down the hall and not knowing she was sending them to me. I picture the years she spent alone, holding herself together withone hand and using the other to reach for a stranger she trusted because strangers are safer than ghosts.

I knock once.

There’s a pause. Then her voice, muffled by water. “What?”

“I need the shower.”

She laughs softly, tired and disbelieving. “You are unbelievable.”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

Then: “Come in, then.”

That should not feel like permission to sin.

It does.