Yegor stood beside me. He had his arms crossed and his jaw set, and he was looking at the wall in the way he looked at things when he was thinking and didn’t want you to know what he was thinking. After a moment, he said, “When did you last eat?”
I looked at him. “That’s what you’re asking?”
“You look like you’ve been awake for thirty-six hours and running on spite.”
“Forty-two,” I said. “And yes.”
He nodded like this confirmed something. He reached into his jacket and produced a protein bar, the slightly smashed kind that had clearly been living in that pocket for some time, and held it out to me without comment.
I stared at it. I took it. I ate it standing in a hospital hallway while the fluorescent light did its particular damage to everyone underneath it, and it was the worst thing I’d eaten in recent memory, and I was grateful for it in a way that I was not going to express to Yegor.
Camila arrived twenty minutes later. She came through the entrance at a speed that communicated everything about what Yegor had told her on the phone, and she looked at me—one sharp, full assessment, the look of a woman taking inventory—and then she was past me and through the door of Sofia’s room before anyone could suggest that the doctors might prefer she wait. Nobody suggested it.
Tomas sat in one of the hallway chairs with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He sat that way for a long time. I stood across from him, and I didn’t sit down because sitting felt like conceding something—some particular version of the waiting I was not willing to accept—and I put my back against the wall, looked at the floor, and tried to organize my interior into something functional.
“I didn’t know about the investigation,” Tomas said. Not defensively—flatly, like a man making a record. “When you and Matvey believed I was the one running arms. I didn’t know. My trucks, my name, my reputation—all of it being used and I didn’t know.” He paused. “And my daughter was the one who found it.”
“She found it before anyone,” I said. And meant it. And hated, specifically and precisely, that I’d stood in Matvey’s office, identified her as part of a chain she had been actively dismantling, looked at her face in the loading bay, and constructed a narrative from the outside in, the way a man does when he has already decided what he’s looking at and is simply collecting evidence to confirm it rather than to question it.
Tomas looked at me for a long moment. “You’re going to tell me you were doing your job.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you that.”
He studied me. Something shifted in his expression—not warmth, not yet, but the specific removal of the hardest layer of the hostility he’d brought with him to my apartment door six days ago when he’d come looking for who had last been seen leaving her building.
“Camila told me,” he said. “About the two of you.”
I didn’t respond.
“Sofia didn’t know that we knew. No one was supposed to; that was the whole arrangement.” He paused. “Camila didn’t trust you to keep her safe, so she told me herself." Another pause. “My daughter couldn’t tell me she was…involved with someone—you. I don’t know if that concerns me more or less than everything else.”
“She was protecting you from having to think about it,” I said. “That’s just who she is: selfless.”
Tomas was quiet. He looked at the door of her room. “She’s twenty-two,” he said.
“I know how old she is.”
“And you’re forty.”
“I know how old I am.”
He looked back at me, and I held it, because I wasn’t going to flinch from this particular accounting. Whatever I was, whatever this was, I was not a man who looked away when someone needed to look at him clearly.
He held my gaze for another long moment, and then he looked at the floor, and he said nothing more, and we sat with that in the hallway—the specific architecture of a reckoning that was not finished, and both of us knew it, and neither of us had the energy to continue right now.
The doctor came out thirty minutes after Camila went in. She was young, efficient, with the manner of someone who had delivered a broad range of news in this hallway and had developed a specific kind of steadiness as a result. She told Tomas—to Tomas, because he was the father, because that was the correct protocol—that Sofia was dehydrated, malnourished, showing signs of sleep deprivation and acute stress, that her blood pressure was lower than they’d like but climbing, that there were no structural injuries, no signs of violence. That she was awake and stable and asking for her sister and her father.
“Gregory.” Yegor’s voice, quiet.
“I heard her,” I said.
“Yes.” A pause. “You should probably go in.”
“Tomas—”
“Tomas isn’t going to stop you,” Yegor said. And he said it with a certainty that told me he and Tomas had had a conversation at some point in the last six days that I hadn’t been present for and that had reached conclusions I wasn’t fully informed about. “Go in.”
I pushed off the wall.