Chapter 76 Marlena
Nikolai suggested the trip to town so casually I almost didn't notice he was steering us out of the house.
"Katya hasn't seen much of Tuscany," he said over breakfast while Elena banged her spoon against her high chair tray, "we should take her to Montepulciano, show her the market."
Katya looked up from her coffee and smiled, easy and genuine, and said "You don't have to do that, I'm happy just being here with you."
"I know," Nikolai said, "but you came all this way, you should see something other than our vineyard," and his voice was light but I caught something underneath it, something that made me look at him more carefully.
He met my eyes for just a second and I saw the message there, go along with this, trust me, don't ask questions right now.
So I didn't ask questions.
"That sounds nice," I said, standing up to wipe Elena's face, "we could use some things from the market anyway."
An hour later we were driving down the winding road toward town with Katya in the front seat talking about the landscape and how different it was from Russia, and Nikolai drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the window frame, looking relaxed even though I could see the tension in his shoulders.
I sat in the back with Elena in her car seat and tried to figure out what he was doing, why he wanted Katya out of the house, what he suspected or knew that he wasn't saying.
The market in Montepulciano was crowded and loud and full of tourists buying ceramics and wine and cheese, and we walked through it slowly with Elena in the stroller and Katya stopping every few stalls to look at things and ask questions in her careful Italian.
She bought flowers from an old woman selling bunches of sunflowers and lavender, and she held them against her chest and said "These remind me of the summers we spent in the countryside when Nikolai and I were children, before everything got complicated."
Nikolai walked ahead of us pretending to look at leather goods but I could see him watching the crowd, scanning faces, checking exits, doing the thing he'd been trained to do for so long that it was probably automatic by now.
I stayed with Katya and listened to her talk.
She told me about her life in Moscow, about the small apartment she'd been living in under her new identity, one bedroom with a view of a concrete wall and neighbors who played music too loud at night but didn't ask questions.
She told me about a man she'd liked who worked at the café downstairs, how she'd gone there every morning for three months hoping he'd notice her the way she noticed him, but he'd been kind and polite and completely uninterested and eventually she'd stopped going.
"It's hard to build a real life when you're always lying about who you are," she said, looking at the flowers in her hands instead of at me, "you can't get close to people because getting close means they start asking questions you can't answer."
"I know," I said, and I did know, I'd been living that exact life for six months before Nikolai came back.
"You're lucky," Katya said, glancing up at me, "you have him and Elena, you have something real, I have apartment walls and fake names and memories of a family that doesn't exist anymore."
There was something sad in her voice that made my chest ache, and I almost reached out to touch her arm, almost said something comforting.
Then she said it.
"I actually ran into an old friend of Nikolai's recently," she said, casual and light like she was mentioning the weather, "a man named Dorian, you probably don't know him, he was from the early days before you and Nikolai met."
I kept my face completely calm even though something cold dropped into my stomach.
"Oh?" I said, "what was he like?"
"Very polite," Katya said, stopping at a stall selling bread and picking up a loaf to smell it, "tall, silver-haired, one of those men who dresses well and speaks softly and you can tell he's used to getting what he wants."
"How did you run into him?" I asked, keeping my voice curious but not too interested.
"Just around," Katya said with a small shrug, "we got to talking and he asked how Nikolai was doing, if I'd heard from him, that sort of thing."
"And what did you tell him?" I asked, my heart beating faster now but my hands steady as I pushed the stroller forward slowly.
"I said I was planning to visit," Katya said, putting the bread back and moving to the next stall, "I didn't give him details obviously but I mentioned I'd be traveling to Italy to see family, I think I said Tuscany actually, I wasn't thinking about it being a secret."
She smiled at me like this was a funny story about a chance encounter and not a potential disaster, and I smiled back and said nothing about the panic rising in my throat.
"That was nice of him to ask about Nikolai," I managed to say.
"I thought so too," Katya agreed, and she bought the bread we'd been looking at and handed it to me to put in the basket under Elena's stroller.
I changed the subject then, asking about the cheese at the next stall and whether she thought the pecorino was better here than in Rome, and we talked about food and cooking and nothing important while I turned her words over and over in my mind.
She told a stranger she was coming to Tuscany.
She told a stranger named Dorian who asked about Nikolai.
Whether she knew what she was doing or not didn't matter anymore, the damage was done, the information was out there, and anyone looking for us now had a direction to search.
I watched Katya move through the market picking out tomatoes and olive oil and fresh pasta, and I tried to see deception in her movements, tried to find proof that this was intentional betrayal, but all I saw was a woman who'd been alone too long and had made a mistake because she was lonely and someone had paid attention to her.
That didn't make it less dangerous.
Nikolai found us near the wine stalls and said we should head back, it was getting late and Elena would need her nap soon, and we walked to the car together with our purchases and drove home in relative silence.
Katya fell asleep in the front seat with the flowers in her lap and her head against the window, and I caught Nikolai's eyes in the rearview mirror and gave him a small nod that meant we needed to talk.
Back at the house Katya went to her room to rest and Nikolai and I put Elena down for her nap and then went out to the porch where we could see anyone approaching.
I told him everything Katya had said, word for word as close as I could remember, and I watched his jaw get tighter with each sentence.
When I finished he was quiet for a long moment, looking out at the vineyard with his hands gripped on the porch railing.
"Dorian," he said finally, "there's no one in my past named Dorian, not that I remember, which means either Katya's memory is failing or she's talking about someone who lied about his name."
"She seemed genuine," I said, "like she really thought it was just a chance encounter."
"That's how they work," Nikolai said, his voice hard now, "they approach in contexts that seem natural, they're friendly and interested and they ask casual questions that don't feel like interrogation, and by the time you realize what happened you've already given them everything they need."
"So what do we do?" I asked.
He turned to look at me and his eyes were serious and sad at the same time.
"We move," he said, "soon, within the week, we can't stay here anymore knowing that information is out there."
"Where would we go?" I asked, even though I knew the answer didn't matter as much as the fact that we had to leave this place we'd started to think of as home.
"I don't know yet," he said, "somewhere farther, somewhere harder to find, maybe South America like we originally planned."
I nodded and looked out at the vineyard we'd been planning to harvest, at the flower garden Nikolai had planted for Elena, at the life we'd been building for the past months, and felt it all slipping away again.
"I'm tired of running," I said quietly.
"I know," Nikolai said, and he reached for my hand and held it tight, "I am too, but running keeps us alive, and alive means we get to keep trying until we find a place they can't reach."
He says they need to move soon.