Page 92 of Sexting the Pakhan

Unknown Number:Take your time.

Unknown Number:Breathe first.

Once, after the twins were born and I was awake at three in the morning with both girls crying and milk leaking through my shirt, I wrote to him without thinking.

Me:I miss being touched like a woman instead of needed like furniture.

I regretted it immediately.

He answered the next day.

Unknown:You are still a woman.

I sat on the bathroom floor and cried silently while Mila slept in a sling against my chest and Nadia hiccupped in the bassinet.

That was the problem with the unknown number. He wasn’t real enough to hurt me properly. He was real enough to make me feel less alone.

Now I sit in the kindergarten parking lot while my daughters begin their first day of school, and I look at the empty message box like a fool.

I type:First day of kindergarten. They were brave. I was not.

My thumb rests above the keyboard.

I don’t send it.

The girls are not something I share with him. Not really. They’re mine. Their gap-toothed smiles, their dramatic breakfast opinions, their bedtime negotiations, their matching birthmarks near their left shoulders, their habit of crawling into my bed during storms and claiming they are “checking on me.”

They are my whole life.

They are also Ruslan’s, though he doesn’t know it.

That thought comes with the old ache, familiar now but still sharp if I press it too hard.

I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if he ever looked for me.

For the first year, I half expected to see a black car outside every apartment I rented. Every time someone knocked unexpectedly, my heart jumped. Every time a man with dark hair passed too close on the street, my body remembered before my mind did.

No one came.

Eventually, waiting became humiliating, so I stopped calling it waiting. I called it survival. Then motherhood.

Then life.

The school bell rings somewhere inside the building. Children’s voices rise faintly beyond the doors.

I look up in time to see Mila at the classroom window. She presses both hands against the glass and mouths something with great seriousness. I laugh because I can read her face perfectly.

She’s saying, “Mama, look!”

Nadia appears beside her and tugs at Mila’s sleeve, probably telling her windows are not for dramatic public announcements.

Mila ignores her and waves harder.

I lift my hand. “I see you,” I whisper, though they cannot hear me.

Nadia gives me one small wave too, dignified and reluctant, like she’s doing me a favor.

“That’s my girl,” I whisper.