The phone Dimitri had given her rang on Tuesday — a number she didn't recognise.
She answered anyway.
"Jane." Luke's voice. And something happened in her chest at the sound of it — not the warm, familiar thing it used to be, but a colder thing. A thing with edges.
"Luke," she said.
"Jane, thank God — are you okay? Where are you? The police think—" His voice was raw, genuinely distressed, and Jane would have believed it completely two weeks ago, before the photograph, before the weeks of small uneasy noticing that she'd talked herself out of.
"I'm okay," she said.
"Where are you? Who has your phone, whose number is this—"
"Luke." She kept her voice very steady. "Stop. I need to ask you something and I need you to tell me the truth."
A brief silence. The kind that wasn't confusion.
"Okay," he said. Cautiously.
"How long?" she asked.
"Jane—"
"How long?" she said again.
Silence. And then, in a smaller voice than she'd ever heard him use: "Four months."
Jane sat with that for a moment. Four months. Half their relationship. She'd been building a future in her head — a quiet, careful, brick-by-brick future — on a foundation that had had a crack in it for four months.
"Right," she said.
"Jane, I'm sorry. I didn't — I never meant to—"
"I know," she said, and surprised herself by finding that she meant it. He hadn't planned to hurt her. He had simply been weak, and careless, and had chosen his comfort over her trust, and those things were true even if they weren't malicious. "I know you didn't mean to."
"Can I — can we talk about this? When you're back? I want to explain—"
"There's nothing to explain," she said. "I understand what happened. I don't need a narrative." She paused. "We're done, Luke. I think you knew that before this call."
He tried again. She let him, because she was fair and he deserved the attempt. And then she said goodbye, gently, with the quiet resolve of a woman who had been given time to grieve a thing that was already over.
She put the phone down.
She looked at the snow outside.
And then, with the efficiency of someone who had always found action better than mourning, she went to find Irina and asked if she could help in the kitchen for the afternoon, because she found cooking meditative, and Irina, who found useful people of any kind deeply satisfying, said yes.
~ * ~
Dimitri found her there an hour later, elbow-deep in the process of making what appeared to be a large pot of something.
He stopped in the kitchen doorway. Jane didn't think he spent much time in the kitchen. He had the particular look of a man encountering an unexpected room in his own house.
"Luke called," she said, without turning around.
A silence. "I know. I authorised the connection. I thought—"
"Thank you," she said. "I needed to have that conversation."
"Are you all right?"
She considered the question with the attention it deserved. "Yes," she said. "I think I am. I think I've been not-all-right for quite a while and I just didn't know what it was called." She stirred the pot. "You can tell whoever you have watching Luke that they can stand down. There's nothing there worth watching anymore."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "How did you know I had someone watching him?"
Jane turned and looked at him with the expression of a woman who had read approximately six hundred mysteries, a literature degree's worth of narrative theory, and two weeks of Dimitri Volkov up close. "Because you know things," she said simply. "You always know things. And you're careful, which means you find out things about people who might be relevant to your — interests." She paused on the word. "So yes. Stand whoever it is down."
He looked at her with that expression she'd been cataloguing for two weeks — the one she'd started thinking of as the expression he had when she did something he wasn't prepared for.
"All right," he said.