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)
The girl understood him. That was the problem. The girl understood everything about him. She understood the insomnia and the engine room and the hands he wouldn't let anyone touch and the smile he didn't give to anyone else, and she understood it all without being told because her hands had read his body like a book and she'd paid attention to every page.
Eleven years. Mila had spent eleven years beside him. She had stood in military briefings and at his father's funeral and in the gallery they'd built together, and she had been warm and generous and present and professional, and she had smiled and smiled and smiled, and he had never once seen her. Not like he saw a girl from Nice who held an old handkerchief in her palm and wept.
When Mila stood, her face was the one she'd wear tomorrow. Warm. Generous. Delighted for them both.
She practised the smile in the bathroom mirror until it reached her eyes.
Artem
"SHE'S TWENTY, ARTEM."
Mila says it over the gallery desk, Tuesday morning, coffee in hand. Warm, direct, with the particular gentleness of a woman who's known me long enough to skip the preamble and go straight for the bone.
I don't answer. I'm reviewing shipping manifests on the laptop, cross-referencing port logs I've been working through since five AM, and I don't answer because there's no answer that doesn't confirm what she already knows.
"I'm not judging," she assures me. "You know I'm not judging. But someone has to say it."
"You don't have to say anything."
"I do, actually. Because you won't say it to yourself." She sets her coffee down. Her nails click once against the porcelain. "She's a child, Artem."
"She's not a child."
"She's twenty. She's a staff member. She earns less in a year than your bar tab." A pause. Mila doesn't rush. She's never rushed. Eleven years of working beside me and she knows exactly when to let silence carry the weight, when to place a word and when to let the absence of one do the damage. "I like her. I genuinely like her. She's lovely." Another pause. "That's the problem."
The laptop closes under my hands before I've decided to close it.
"If she were harder," Mila continues, leaning back in her chair, her voice low and sad and absolutely certain, "if she were someone who could handle this world, handle you, handle what Almazov means to the people who aren't on this ship, then fine. But she's not. She's a girl from Nice who puts her hands on people for a living and thinks the most valuable thing about her is her grip strength. She holds handkerchiefs and weeps. She can't button her own uniform. And you're going to let her fall in love with you and then what?"
Around us, the gallery is silent. The jade figure glows in its case.
"Then what, Artem? You bring her into this? She meets your brothers? She learns what we actually do?" Mila's voice is level, kind even, and that's the worst part, because this isn't cruelty. This is a woman who has stood beside me for eleven years and seen what I do and helped me do it, asking me a question I don't have an answer for. "You'll destroy her. Without meaning to, without cruelty. Because you are what you are and she is what she is and those two things don't survive contact."
I can still feel the lace thread pattern pressed into my palm from three nights ago. Star's fingers landing on mine. Her face tilting up. The look in her eyes when I closed my hand around hers, open, terrified, radiant.
"I hear you," I tell her.
"Do you?"
I stand. Push the chair back. "I hear you, Mila."
She doesn't follow. I can feel her eyes on my back as I leave, and her expression will be the same one it always is when she's worried about me: careful, warm, a little sad. The expression of a woman who has earned the right to say hard things. I've seen it for eleven years. She wore it when I came back from my last deployment with three new scars and a month of silence behind my teeth. She wore it when we buried my father and I didn't speak for two weeks and she sat beside me in the gallery every night and never once asked if I was all right because she already knew the answer.
She's not wrong. That's what I can't get past. She isn't wrong about any of it.
Star is twenty. Star earns four hundred euros an hour and considers that a fortune. Star held a Mayflower handkerchief in her palm and got teary about the woman who made it and she has no idea what I do, what I've done, what the name on the side of this ship actually costs the people who carry it.