Page 24 of Conquer
And nothing I tell myself seems capable of stopping it.
* * *
By the time night falls,Magda is the one who tires out first. She barely manages to keep her eyes open during dinner. I feel the need to take her hand once her plate is cleared away just to make sure I can get her upstairs without her falling asleep along the way.
As we leave the dining room, my mother’s voice chases me, one of her stern reminders. “Don’t forget, Tiffy, darling! We need to meet this businessman of yours. Preferably before the end of the week. He wouldn’t want to make a bad impression, now would he?”
I do my best to ignore her as I lead Magda into the guest bedroom and help her dress in a fresh nightgown and braid her hair. She’s seemingly on the verge of drifting off when suddenly she bolts upright and scrambles for something on her nightstand—her fanny pack, from which she withdraws her blue cell phone. As I watch in confusion, she dials a number and holds the receiver to her ear.
The moment I assume someone picks up on the other end, her body relaxes, and she slumps against the pillows, It clutched in her free hand.
“Yes, I had fun,” she says tiredly, her words slurring. But I can sense the effort she makes to keep talking, humoring the figure speaking to her in a gentle, insistent hum. But eventually, her replies come further apart until I feel the urge to gingerly pry the phone from her grasp before she nods off altogether.
“Goodnight,ma chérie,” a gruff voice urges from the other end, so gentle and soothing I nearly break in the face of it.
“Wait,” I croak before he can hang up.
I hear his breath catch, and the seconds tick by as I gather up the nerve to keep speaking. “I… My parents want to meet you,” I blurt in a rush. “I think it’s best, even if… They should meet you. For Magda’s sake. Later we can come up with a lie to—” I break off, my eyes on a drowsy, barely coherent Magda. After what she overheard the last time, I’ve learned my lesson about speaking freely around her. “We can devise anexplanationfor how things really are,” I say, changing tact. “But not now. They deserve to at least get to know you first.”
Silence, so thick I can feel it constricting my throat falls. Just when I’m on the verge of suffocating, his voice returns, far more cautious than the warm, honeyed tone he used with Magda.
“I can be on the plane within the hour.”
“Okay?” My tongue stiffens, making the word an awkward question.
“Goodnight,” Vadim says.
“Bye.” I hang up and drop the phone back on the nightstand as if burned. After kissing Magda on the cheek and ensuring her toys are within her reach, I creep from her room and enter mine. My mother—as knowing as she is—ensured that Magda had the suite just one door down.
* * *
This time,I don’t sleep deeply enough to miss the telltale patter of her getting up hours later. Yawning, I wash up and get dressed and manage to catch her just as she pads out of her room, fully clothed, fanny pack in place, her curls tousled.
“I’m supposed to help with the weeding today,” she tells me, her expression so serious that I can’t resist ruffling her messy hair.
“What about some braids first, sleepyhead?” She follows me into my old room, and I set her up at my vanity, watching her scan our surroundings with barely concealed interest.
“This was your room?” she asks, sounding skeptical once more.
I nod, but even I can admit that the décor and color scheme is a little outdated. “Sit still.”
I smooth a brush through her hair, and I’m finishing the second plait when I realize a fact that makes me stiffen. “Vadim is coming today,” I confess, surprised by how her features light up for a split second before she reigns in any excitement behind one of her neutral masks. “But my parents don’t really know the full…details.”
She nods, and I’m sure that a child as perceptive as she is picked up on way more nuances about those “details” than anyone else has.
“Lying is wrong,” I say to preface my next request. “But, probing questions are annoying, and my mother is the queen of them.”
“So, we have to pretend?” Magda inquires, an eyebrow raised.Damn.She’s copied her father’s inflection—when he’s in the middle of devising a devious twist or laying the foundation of some mind game or another. As if she’s testing me, waiting to see if I’ll say the right thing.
Or fail entirely.
“Not pretend,” I say softly.
To stall for time, I rifle through the drawers of my vanity, finding an old stash of hair ribbon. I select two light blue strands and weave them through the ends of her braids, tying them into bows.
“Let’s think of it more as…evading. Whatever we’re comfortable defending, we defend. And what we’re not, we compromise on. And not by lying,” I add, turning her chair so that she faces me. “But just by cleverly avoiding the truth. For now.”
My convoluted way of explaining that while Vadim and I may pretend to be a couple now, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
