Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
She tried to want it. She sat across from Paolo Sabbatini and his unmarked hands and his easy honesty and she told herself: this is what “someone good” looks like. This is the man Andrei wanted for you. This is the clean, safe, civilian life that a dying father asked his son to provide.
She couldn’t want it.
She couldn’t want it because every time Paolo smiled, she thought about the way Andrei didn’t smile, the way his face held stillness instead, and how the absence of a smile on that face was more expressive than any smile she had ever seen. Every time Paolo reached for her hand, she thought about scarred knuckles on a champagne flute. Every time he spoke, openly, warmly, without the weighed, rationed delivery of a man who counted every word before releasing it, she thought about a voice in a Geneva galley saying her name once, low, like it cost him something.
Paolo deserved better than a woman who was thinking about someone else every time he touched her.
She knew this. She’d end it soon. She owed him that.
Anton appeared at her door on a Tuesday evening.
She hadn’t been expecting him. She hadn’t been expecting anyone, it was nine o’clock and she was in pyjamas and her hair was down and she was eating leftover pasta from a container and reading a novel she wasn’t absorbing when the knock came. Not a tentative knock. A confident one. The knock of a man who expected doors to open.
She opened it.
He looked like Andrei.
That was the first thing, the gut-level, involuntary thing that hit her before thought could intervene. The same height, the same build, the same dark hair. Twins. But where Andrei was stone, this man was warmth. His face was open in a way Andrei’s never was, the jaw less set, the eyes less guarded, the mouth shaped for smiling in a way that suggested it smiled often and without being asked. He was holding a bottle of wine and wearing an expression she recognised: the weary, fond, exasperated expression of a man watching someone he loved self-destruct and running out of ways to stop it.
“Ciana Reyes,” he said. Not a question. “I’m Anton.”
“I know who you are.”
“Of course you do. May I come in? I brought wine. It’s good wine. Andrei would have brought better wine but Andrei is currently sitting in a hangar in Nice staring at an empty jet, so the wine selection falls to me.”
She let him in because refusing would have required more energy than she had, and because the note he had slid under her door in Istanbul had cracked something in her that she hadn’t yet been able to seal.
He sat at her small kitchen table. She opened the wine. It was good wine. They looked at each other across the table, the twin of the man she loved and the woman who had walked away from him, and the silence was heavy with things neither of them wanted to say first.
Anton said them anyway. That was, she’d learn, what Anton did.
“He hasn’t flown since you left.”
She set her glass down.
“The jet sits on the tarmac. Has for three weeks. He goes to the hangar every morning, every morning, Ciana, and he walks through the cabin and he stands in the galley and then he leaves. He doesn’t tell anyone why. He doesn’t need to. The man reeks of grief and he doesn’t even know it.”
She said nothing. She held her glass and looked at the wine and felt the image settle into her, Andrei in the empty galley, hands on the counter where hers had been, standing in the space where she had stood, and it hurt. It hurt more than she had expected and she had expected it to hurt a great deal.
“He snapped at Alexei,” Anton continued. His voice was quieter now. “Andrei has never defied Alexei. Not once. Not in thirty-five years. He called him and said: ‘I did what you asked. I found her someone good. Are you satisfied?’”
“And was Alexei satisfied?”
Anton looked at her. The warmth in his face was still there but underneath it was something sharper: the intelligence of a man who saw everything, who had spent his life reading rooms and people and the spaces between what was said and what was meant.
“I’ll tell you what Alexei said. But first I need you to answer something. Why did you leave?”
She almost laughed. “You know why I left.”
“I know what he did. I want to hear why it made you leave.”
She set the glass down. Looked at Anton, at his face, which was Andrei’s face rewritten in warmth, the same features made gentle and open and readable, and told him.
“Because I had never touched a man before him. Not like that. Not any of it. And twelve hours later there was a woman in my seat.”