“Good.” She meant it. She’d spent a long time being angry at Dmytro and had eventually understood that he hadn’t done anything except occupy space that she’d let him occupy. “He always needed someone who was certain about him.”
“You weren’t.”
“No.” She looked at the candle nearest her, the wax pooling slow and soft. “I wasn’t.”
A pause.
“Nadia.”
“Don’t,” she said. Not sharp. Almost gentle. “Not yet. I’m not — I need another minute to be the version of me who is handling this well.”
He waited. He had always been good at waiting.
The minute passed.
“Okay,” she said.
“I found you,” he said. “I know it wasn’t dramatic. I know it was a conference roster. But I saw your name and I didn’t withdraw from the keynote.”
She looked at him. “You could have.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He said, “Because I made you a promise in a doorway in the rain and I’ve been a coward about it for seven years and I’m tired of being a coward.”
She was quiet for a long moment. The jasmine. The candles. The city beyond the iron fence, old and lit and indifferent.
“What’s the thing?” she asked.
“What?”
“The thing you weren’t saying. Seven years ago. What was it?”
He looked at her steadily. “That I was already in love with you. That I’d been in love with you since the third week of the Podil project when you told me my load-bearing wall solution was elegant but misguided and you were completely right.”
She laughed. It came out shaky. “I was right.”
“You were always right.”
“Viktor.”
“I know it’s been seven years. I know you’ve built a whole life. I’m not asking you to — I just needed to say it. I promised I would.”
She stood up. He thought, for one awful second, that she was leaving.
She wasn’t. She was just standing because she couldn’t sit still for what she was about to say.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “About why I left Kyiv when I did.”
He waited.
“It wasn’t because of Dmytro. Not really. It was because I was terrified of what I felt for you and I had no idea what to do with it and leaving was the only thing I could think of that felt safe.” She looked at him directly. “I have been safe for seven years. I am very, very tired of safe.”
—
That was the moment. That was what led to the corridor outside room 14, the magnolia wallpaper, the envelope.
The envelope was a room key. His, slid under her door sometime after midnight with a note that said only: If you want to talk more. No pressure. I’ll be awake.
She’d stood in her room holding it for ten minutes.
Then she’d gone to the corridor and stood there, and that was where he’d found her — because he’d been coming to take the note back, certain he’d overstepped, certain he’d read it wrong.
He hadn’t read it wrong.
“I’m not afraid of this,” she said, when he appeared at the end of the corridor. Her voice was steady in a way that had cost her something. “I thought I would be. I’ve been afraid of it for seven years. But standing here right now, I’m just — I’m not.”
He walked toward her. Slow, like he was giving her time to change her mind.
She didn’t.
What she understood, standing in that corridor with the magnolias on the wall and the old city quiet around them, was this: she hadn’t left Kyiv because she was afraid of Viktor. She’d left because she’d been afraid of wanting something that much — of needing something to be real and having it fail. She’d spent seven years calling that wisdom.
It wasn’t wisdom. It was just fear with better posture.
He stopped in front of her. Close enough that she could see the exact moment his expression shifted from careful to certain.
“I’m still going to be terrible about load-bearing walls,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m counting on it.”
She reached up and took his face in both hands, and the envelope fluttered to the floor between them, and outside, Charleston went on being old and lit and entirely unconcerned with the two of them finally, finally arriving at the thing they’d been circling for seven years.
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