— MIA —
Damien was gone before I woke up.
I knew because the house had a different quality to it in his absence. Quieter, yes, but not in a relieved way. More like a held breath. Like the walls knew something I didn't and were waiting to see what I would do with the space he had left behind.
I lay in bed for exactly four minutes before I gave up on sleep.
The kitchen smelled like coffee when I came downstairs, which meant someone had been up before me. I stopped in the doorway.
The woman at the stove was somewhere in her sixties, small and precise in her movements, with silver hair pinned back and an apron that had clearly been washed so many times it had forgotten its original color. She turned before I could announce myself, which meant she had heard me on the stairs, which meant she was the kind of person who noticed things quietly.
"You must be Mia," she said. Not unkindly. Not with the careful neutrality that Viktor used, that quality of professionally withholding judgment. Just simply, like it was a fact she was confirming rather than a greeting she was performing.
"I must be," I said.
A small smile. "I am Elena. I keep the house." She turned back to the stove. "Sit down. I will make you eggs."
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. Sit down."
I sat down.
Elena moved around the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this for decades and had long since stopped thinking about it. She didn't ask me questions, which I appreciated more than I could say. She put a plate in front of me and sat across from me with her own coffee and looked out the window at the morning garden.
"How long have you worked here?" I asked, because the silence was comfortable enough that a question fit into it naturally.
"Eleven years," she said. "Since before this house was this house."
"What was it before?"
"Quieter." She said it without elaboration, which told me everything.
I ate my eggs.
"He is not a bad man," Elena said after a while. She was still looking out the window. "I say this not because I am paid to say it. I say it because I have worked for bad men and I know the difference."
I looked at her.
"He is a hard man," she continued. "There is a difference. Hard men have reasons. Bad men don't need them."
I thought about what I had seen in the library. The worn chair. The books actually read. The handwriting in the Dostoevsky.
For when the world stops making sense.
"I am not saying I trust him," I said carefully.
"I am not asking you to." She stood and took her cup to the sink. "I am just telling you what I know. What you do with it is your business."
She moved back to her work and left me with my coffee and the morning light and the complicated, unwelcome feeling of a simple story becoming less simple.
✦✦✦
I spent the morning learning the house.
Not the forbidden parts. I was not ready for that yet, or perhaps more accurately, I was choosing my moments. There was a difference between being reckless and being strategic, and I had always been more the second than the first, whatever Ryan used to say about my temper.
The permitted spaces were larger than I had registered on the first night. The library I knew. The kitchen. A smaller sitting room on the east side that had a window seat I immediately identified as the best spot in the house, south-facing, full of afternoon light, the kind of place designed for reading or thinking or staring at nothing in particular.
I found a music room on the second floor that looked like it had not been used in years. A piano with the cover down, gathering almost no dust because Elena was clearly thorough, but with the particular stillness of an instrument no one plays anymore. There was sheet music on the stand. I looked at it without touching it.
Chopin.
I filed that away without knowing why.
By afternoon I had covered everything I was allowed to cover and was beginning to feel the walls again. I went out to the garden, which was permitted and which I had not tried yet, and sat on a stone bench near the far hedge and tipped my head back and looked at the sky.
It was a very ordinary sky. Blue, some clouds moving fast from the west. It looked the same as every other sky I had looked at from every other place I had ever been.
That helped, somehow. That the sky was the same.
"You should not sit directly on the stone."
I did not jump. I had heard Viktor coming, which was difficult because he moved quietly for a large man, but the gravel gave him away.
"Why not?"
"It is cold. You will get sick."
"I will risk it."
He said nothing. But he did not leave either, which surprised me. Viktor had a quality of efficient disappearance, present when needed and gone when not. Standing in the garden with no obvious purpose was not his established pattern.
"Do you want to sit down?" I asked.
A pause that was almost funny.
"No."
"Okay."
He stood. I sat. The clouds moved.
"He will be back late tonight," Viktor said eventually. "He asked me to tell you."
I looked up at him. He was not looking at me, but at the hedge, with the expression of someone delivering a message they were not entirely comfortable delivering.
"He asked you to tell me?"
"Yes."
"Why did he not text me himself? I have the phone."
A pause.
"He said you would have questions and he did not have time for questions."
I stared at Viktor for a long moment. Viktor continued to look at the hedge.
"That is the most honest thing anyone in this house has said to me," I said.
Something shifted in Viktor's expression. Barely perceptible. If I had not been watching closely I would have missed it entirely.
"He is careful with people," Viktor said. "He has always been careful with people. It looks like coldness from the outside. It is not always coldness."
"What is it then?"
Viktor was quiet for a moment.
He lost someone, he said finally. Before your brother. Someone he was not careful enough with. After that he became very careful.
I wanted to ask who. I could see from the way Viktor had closed slightly, the almost imperceptible straightening, that he had already said more than he had intended to.
So I didn't ask.
I stored it instead, the way I was learning to store things in this house.
"Thank you, Viktor," I said.
He nodded once. Turned and walked back across the gravel toward the house.
I sat on the cold stone bench until the light changed and the clouds swallowed the last of the afternoon, thinking about careful men and what they were hiding behind all that care.
And about a forbidden wing of a house that I had not yet found a reason to enter.
Not yet.
✦