Page 195 of Sexting the Pakhan

I sit on the closed toilet lid. He picks up my clothes piece by piece and helps me into them without making it feel clinical or rushed. He eases my blouse over my shoulders, fastens two buttons when my fingers miss, then looks away while I fix the rest myself. I dry his hair with the towel because if I don’t do something with my hands, I’ll end up touching his face and that feels too close to a confession.

When I bend to look at his bandage, he says, “I’m fine.”

“You are absolutely not.”

“It held.”

“Your standards are embarrassing.”

That gets the smallest pull at the corner of his mouth.

I crouch carefully and check the edge of the dressing where water might have gotten in. He steadies himself on the sink and lets me fuss. That alone tells me more about his state than any honest answer would.

When I’m done, I stand and say, “You shouldn’t put weight on it for a while.”

“I gathered that when I was shot.”

I give him a flat look. “Still annoying.”

“You say that like it’s new.”

We leave the bathroom quieter than we entered it.

The cottage is dark except for the lamp by the sofa. The girls are asleep in the bedroom, and the house has that thin, fragile silence of a place holding too many emotions at once. I bring him painkillers and water. He takes both without argument, which means he really is in pain.

I sit at the other end of the sofa with my legs tucked under me and my wet hair over one shoulder.

For a while, neither of us says anything.

Then he asks, “Were you all right?”

I look at him. “That’s a very large question.”

“Yes.”

“No,” I say honestly. “Not for a while.”

He nods once, like he expected that.

I stare at the lamp instead of at him. “The first few months were awful. I was sick all the time. Tired. Angry. Scared.” I laugh without humor. “I used to cry because the kettle took too long.”

He says nothing.

“I told my parents I’d made a mistake with a man who couldn’t be in my life. That was the soft version. My mother cried. My father tried not to. Karina nearly committed murder in my honor several times.”

At that, he does look at me.

I continue before I can stop. “I found a small flat. Then a worse one. Then a better one after the girls were born. I worked whatever I could from home at first. Cataloguing jobs, records clean-up, archive data, anything that paid and didn’t require me to explain why I couldn’t come into an office with two newborns.”

His gaze stays on me. It’s not pity. Thank God.

“I learned how to do everything at once,” I say. “Feed one baby while changing the other. Sleep sitting up. Smile at health visitors while feeling like I might disappear. There were months when I knew exactly how much milk, electricity, and hope I had left, and all three numbers were bad.”

“Zoya.”

Just my name.

Low. Regret in it.