CAGED IN CRIMSON

THE END...

Six Months Later — Mara

I still have the apartment. This matters to me, and I want to be precise about why. It's not

that I don't trust what Nikolai and I are building — I do, in the careful, specific way that I trust

things I have examined from every angle and found sound. It's that I learned something about

myself in those three weeks in the stone house, which is that the things I call mine are

structural to how I function. The apartment is mine. The work is mine. Elena is mine in the

way of friends who know you well enough to ask the hard questions and love you anyway.

Those things don't become less mine because I've added something to them.

I spend most of my time at the estate now. This is a fact about my life that I have stopped

needing to reconcile with other facts about my life, because reconciliation implies conflict and

there isn't one anymore. There was one for a while — in the early months, when I was still

learning how to be in a relationship with someone whose life looked like his, when I was still

working out what the terms were and whether the terms were mine as much as his. That work

took time and several very honest conversations and at least two arguments that I think we

both needed to have.

But.

The garden in spring is extraordinary. The roses come back with the kind of intensity

that feels almost argumentative — every surface, every wall, every possible vertical — and

the whole property smells of it in the mornings. I walk the perimeter path every morning.

Dostoevsky comes sometimes, when she judges the weather acceptable.

Nikolai joins me some mornings. Not all of them — we have both maintained our

solitudes, our separate work hours, our individual hours in our respective libraries. The some

of it feels like the right shape. Not a merger but an alignment.

He told me, in February, more than he'd told me during those three weeks in the autumn.

Not everything — there are rooms in him that stay closed and I have made my peace with the

— 64 — architecture. But enough. Enough to understand the shape of the life he'd built and the costs of

it and the work he was doing to change its dimensions. Not for me. He was careful to be clear

about that: not for me, for himself, because he had come to a point in his life where the thing

he had built felt like a structure he was maintaining rather than inhabiting.

I understood that. I had spent years maintaining the idea of a life.

'What are you translating?' he asked this morning. He was at the end of my desk, which

he occupied occasionally, reading something of his own — we had developed this

shared-workspace habit that I found I loved in a way I hadn't expected.

'Chekhov,' I said. 'The letters to Olga. A small press edition, good project.'

'Which letters?'

'All of them. Chekhov was in Yalta for the health, she was in Moscow for the work, and

he wrote to her every day. Sometimes twice.' I looked at him. 'He was very good at being apart

from people he loved and still making them feel present.'

Nikolai was quiet for a moment. 'He died young.'

'Forty-four. He knew he was dying when he wrote most of them.' I looked at the page in

front of me. 'The letters get — warmer, toward the end. Less careful.'

'Less managed,' he said.

'Yes.'

He reached across the desk and put his hand over mine. I turned my hand over and held

it.

'I'm going to Moscow in two weeks,' he said. 'Work. Four days.'

'I know. You told me.'

'I'll write,' he said. Said it simply, like it had been decided without deciding.

'Every day?' I asked.

'Yes,' he said. 'Every day.'

— 65 — I looked at him. At this man who had taken my life apart and put it back together in a

shape I hadn't chosen and that turned out to be better than the one I'd had. At the broken nose

and the silver temples and the eyes that had never, not once, looked away.

'All right,' I said. 'Every day.'

He went back to his reading. I went back to Chekhov's letters, the ones that got warmer

toward the end, less careful, the ones that said: I love you, this is difficult, I love you anyway,

I love you in spite of everything, the distance doesn't change it, I am yours.

Outside, the spring roses climbed the old stone walls.

The house held us.

~ THE END ~

Book Two: GILDED RUIN — Coming Next in the Obsidian Kings Series