Page 88 of Sexting the Pakhan

For a moment, I don’t understand the words. They’re too practical. Too clean. Too cruel in their timing.

“What?”

“The immediate threat is reduced. I’ll have Stepan arrange a car. You can go to Karina, your parents, a hotel. Wherever you want.”

I stare at him.

Two weeks inside this house. Two weeks in his bed. Two weeks of him learning how I take my tea and where I’m ticklish and which memories make me quiet. Two weeks of letting myself believe that temporary had started to mean something else.

And he’s offering me transport.

“That’s what you came home to say?” I ask.

His jaw moves. “It’s safer.”

“For whom?”

His silence is long enough.

I nod once, slowly, because I understand. Maybe not all of it, but enough.

He thinks sending me away is protection. Or punishment. Or self-control. Or all three wrapped in the same cold logic he uses for everything else. The worst part is that he may even believe he’s doing the decent thing.

He walks past me without saying anything else.

The house settles around me. Men murmur in the distance. Water runs somewhere upstairs. Someone starts cleaning blood from the floor near the entrance, though I hadn’t noticed any had fallen there.

I look down. A faint red mark stains the tile near where Ruslan stood.

For some reason, that’s what finally breaks me.

Not loudly. I don’t sob. I don’t fall apart in the foyer like a woman in a bad melodrama. I just stand there with one hand pressed flat against my stomach, staring at the blood he leftbehind, and understand that whatever I thought I was going to tell him today will have to stay inside me a little longer.

Because this morning I was afraid I might be pregnant.

Tonight, I’m afraid of what it would mean if I am.

13

ZOYA

Six years later,I cry in the kindergarten parking lot.

I try to do it quietly, because there are other parents everywhere and I still have some dignity left, but the sunglasses are not doing as much work as I hoped.

The school looks too cheerful for emotional destruction. Yellow walls, painted flowers near the entrance, tiny shoes lined up outside classrooms, teachers bending down to greet children like this is a normal day and not the day my daughters officially begin leaving me in small, socially acceptable stages.

Mila runs ahead first, backpack bouncing against her shoulders.

Nadia follows with one hand gripping her water bottle and the other clutching the strap of her bag like she’s going into battle.

“Mila, slow down,” I call after her.

Mila turns around while still moving and says, “I know where I’m going, Mama.”

“You have been here once,” I say.

Nadia looks up at me and says, “Technically twice, because orientation counts.”