Somewhere That Isn't There

Camille's apartment was on the third floor and it smelled like dog. She burned candles to fix that. It didn't fix it.

Door opened before I knocked. She'd been at the window.

"You look terrible," Camille said.

"Thank you."

She took the box inside and the dog launched himself at me and I just stood there and let it happen. He was warm. He didn't know anything. That was enough.

"You hungry?"

"No."

She went to the stove anyway.

Eggs, toast, coffee I couldn't drink because of the seven weeks I was not telling her about. I pushed the mug aside and said it was too hot and she let me lie because that's what Camille did. She always let me have my lies until she didn't.

I sat with my hands in my lap and looked at the room while she cooked. It wasn't the first time I'd been here but today the smallness of it settled differently. The low ceiling. The furniture arranged as close as it was because there was no other way. None of it was bad.

It was just real in a way I hadn't been around in a while, and I was sitting in it with one cardboard box and nowhere else to be, and I was keeping that thought at arm's length the same way I was keeping several others.

"How did he do it," she said. Not a question.

"Does it matter."

"Mara."

I looked at my toast. "He sent Dimitri to walk me out. Had the NDA ready. Everything done before I even got downstairs."

She was quiet for a second. "The tattoo?"

"Gone."

"God." She sat back. "How long ago did he"

"Before he told me. Weeks before, maybe. I don't know."

Camille had never liked Viktor. She'd never said it outright but I felt it every time his name came up, the way her face went carefully flat. She was doing it now.

There was something else in it too, something more careful than usual, like she was watching me more closely than the conversation required. I didn't look at her long enough to be sure.

"You can stay."

"I won't be long."

"Mara"

"I won't be long, Camille."

She didn't push. Good. I needed her not to push. There was a version of this conversation, close enough to touch, where she asked the right question at the wrong moment and I said something I couldn't take back. I wasn't ready for that version. I wasn't sure I'd be ready for it for a while.

She refilled her coffee and we sat there and the dog put his head in my lap and I stared at the wall and thought about my studio. The way morning light hit the north window at nine a.m. exactly, that particular angle that made every color honest.

I'd spent three months convincing Viktor's architect to adjust the roofline so it came through right.

Elara was going to put a vanity in there. Hang mirrors everywhere. Kill the light completely.

I put my hand flat on the table and pushed up.

"I need to make some calls." I picked up the box before she could argue.

The guest room hadn't changed. Small, narrow window, brick wall on the other side of it. I sat on the bed and finally looked at my phone.

Fourteen notifications. All work  clients I hadn't told yet, a supplier following up on a spring order, two emails from the fashion week coordinator who didn't know my situation had just dissolved overnight.

Nothing from Viktor.

I don't know what I expected.

I put the phone face down on the mattress and lay back and looked at the ceiling and did the thing I'd been not doing all morning, which was letting myself think about the first time.

Not the first time I realized I was in love with him  that had happened so slowly it barely had a moment, more like weather than event. I mean the actual first time.

Three years into living in that house, a night in February, a bottle of wine that turned into two, Viktor looking at me across the kitchen island like he was seeing something new.

That was my fault. I let myself believe it meant something.

Four months later he flew to Milan for a trade summit and came back with Elara Conti's number in his phone.

I stayed anyway.

Six more years. I stayed six more years after that, designing his collections, running his studio, pretending I was fine, pretending it was enough, pretending I was not the most foolish woman alive.

And now here I was. Third floor walkup. Brick wall outside the window.

Every week it was going to get harder to hide. I knew that. I just wasn't ready to know it yet.

I went to set an alarm. That's when the alert caught my eye.

A news alert. Posted forty minutes ago, while I was in the car, while I was watching the estate disappear in the window.

Volkov Industries acquires Conti Group in landmark merger  insider sources confirm personal ties between Viktor Volkov and Elara Conti drove the deal.

I read it twice.

So that was what it was. Not just a woman he'd chosen. A merger. A business arrangement built alongside whatever they were to each other, running parallel the whole time, and I had been in that house every single day while all of it was being put together.

I kept looking at the words personal ties and thinking about ten years and a tattoo that had been gone for weeks before I knew it.

Then I read the last line.

The couple is expected to announce their engagement by end of month.

I sat up.

End of month. He had walked me out this morning and in a matter of days he was going to announce his engagement, and all of it had been in motion long before today, long before the conversation in my studio, long before Dimitri and the NDA and the grocery store box.

The whole shape of it landed at once. He hadn't chosen her over me. He had never been choosing at all. I had just been the last to understand the terms.

My phone buzzed in my hand. Unknown number. I almost let it go. Something made me answer.

Six years since I'd heard that voice. I'd stopped expecting to.

Mara.

Quiet. Thin.

It's Natalia.

A breath.

Viktor's mother. I need to see you tonight. Tell nobody.

Gone before I got a word out.

I sat there with the phone in my hand and the news alert still open on the screen. Natalia Volkov had not reached out to me in six years. She had chosen tonight, of all nights, an hour after I walked out of that gate, to call me in secret.

That wasn't sentiment. That wasn't a woman checking on someone she used to know.

She knew something. And whatever it was, it was bad enough that she didn't want her own son to find out she'd told me.