I picked up my phone, then put it down. I stood and went to the kitchen for water I didn’t particularly want, stood at the counter for a moment looking out at the city turning orange and gold outside the glass, and thought very deliberately about how little I was thinking about him.
I called Camila at ten past six.
She answered on the second ring with the ease of someone who had been expecting it, which, with Camila, was functionally the same thing. I could hear her heels on a hard floor, the faint background noise of wherever she was, and her voice when she came on had the particular warmth she reserved for me, lower and less polished than the version she wore in rooms with other people.
“Finally,” she said. “I was giving you until seven.”
“I wasn’t going to call,” I said.
“And yet.” She paused. The heel-clicking stopped—she’d settled somewhere. “What happened?”
I tried to organize it into something reportable.Gregory left this morning. There was a warehouse fire. Two people died. He hasn’t contacted me since.All of those things were true, and none of them explained the actual problem, which was less about the waiting and more about what the waiting was revealing about me. “Nico retaliated,” I said. “Something with a warehouse. Gregory left, and I’ve heard nothing.”
Camila was quiet for a moment, which meant she already knew—Yegor would have told her, and Yegor told her everything that he decided wasn’t classified, and their line on classified was different from most people’s. “I know,” she said. “Yegor was out most of the day too.”
“Did he call you?”
“Twice.”
I looked at the skyline.
“Sofia.” Her voice shifted—not unkind, but direct, the register she used when she’d decided she was going to say something true whether I wanted her to or not. “Ask me what you actually want to ask me.”
“I don’t want to ask you anything.”
“Then why did you call?”
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth for a moment, irritated with myself in the specific way I’d been irritated with myself since approximately the first night I let Gregory Kamarov through my door. “I just wanted to know he was okay,” I said. “That’s it. It’s not complicated.”
“It’s not complicated at all,” Camila agreed, with the warmth of someone who found it extremely complicated and was choosing, for once, not to make that point. Another pause. “He’s fine, Sofia. Yegor saw him at Matvey’s two hours ago. He’s fine.”
The thing that moved through me at that was embarrassingly acute—a loosening, a breath I hadn’t known I was holding releasing itself without my permission. I straightened against the counter and looked at the window and hated, very specifically, how much relief felt like information about myself. “Good,” I said. “That’s good.”
“Is that all you wanted to know?”
I should have said yes. I should have said yes and made a comment about Camila’s evening and ended the call with my dignity mostly intact. Instead, I stood in his kitchen in his apartment, wearing a borrowed sweater, and said, “He should have called.”
Camila made a sound—not quite a laugh, something warmer and more careful than a laugh. “That’s your husband, not Yegor,” she said. “They’re different.”
“I’m aware they’re different.”
“Gregory Kamarov has spent twenty years not answering to anyone.” Her voice carried something that wasn’t criticism—more like the even assessment of a woman who’d spent years watching Bratva men and had developed calibrated expectations. “One day of marriage isn’t going to teach him to check in. That takes time. It takes—” She paused. “It takes him believing someone wants him to come back.”
“He knows I want him to come back.”
“Does he?”
I closed my mouth. The question settled in the space the silence made, and I turned it over, and I thought about last night.
He had saidit was real,and I’d believed him because he’d said it the way I said things I didn’t want to say but couldn’t in good conscience withhold.
I’d believed him, and I’d let the distance between us close, and I’d held onto the night with both hands.
But believing something in the dark and demonstrating you believed it in the daylight were not the same act, and I was not sure I’d managed the second one before he’d walked out with his phone and his jacket.
“We don’t have that kind of marriage,” I said, and heard immediately how it sounded. “I mean—it’s not—we didn’t build this the normal way. We didn’t date, we didn’t—” I stopped. “He married me because I’m pregnant.”
The silence that followed was Camila not saying everything she could have said, which was its own kind of answer. I heard her exhale slowly. “Sofia.” Her voice was quiet now, the way she spoke when she was being careful with me in the way only she knew how to be. “I watched that man sit in a hospital hallway for four hours. I watched him pace until the floors should have worn through. He wasn’t there because of the baby.” A pause. “He didn’t even know about the baby yet.”