Three weeks in, the snow outside the windows had become something Jane no longer registered as alien. It had become, with the stubborn adaptability of a person who had no choice but to adapt, simply the view. White and immense and, in its own way, beautiful.
She had developed a routine: mornings in the library, afternoons helping Irina or exploring the parts of the house she'd been given access to, evenings with Dimitri over the chess board or, increasingly, simply talking. They talked about books — she had discovered, with some surprise, that he had opinions about literature that were sharp and idiosyncratic and frequently wrong in interesting ways. They argued about Tolstoy for forty minutes one evening and she was fairly certain he'd enjoyed every second of it.
She had also, in the library, found a Russian textbook.
"Zdravstvuyte," she said to Irina the morning after she found it, carefully deploying what she'd managed to learn overnight.
Irina's face did something remarkable. The broad, composed face cracked open into a smile of genuine delight that transformed it entirely. She replied in rapid, enthusiastic Russian, and Jane caught none of it but smiled back anyway.
"She says your accent is terrible," Dimitri said from behind her. Jane turned; he was standing at the kitchen doorway with his coffee. "But that you are a good student."
"My accent is not that bad," Jane said with dignity.
"It is that bad," he said. "But it's improving." And he said something to Irina in Russian that made the housekeeper laugh, a warm, real sound that filled the kitchen.
Jane looked at him. He was watching Irina with a softness he didn't deploy anywhere else — a small, unguarded warmth for this woman who had clearly been as much a mother to him as anyone. And Jane, who had spent three weeks watching him and thinking she was beginning to understand him, understood something new.
He was not unreachable. He was just — unlocked only from very specific angles. You had to know which door to try.
She told herself this was useful information and filed it carefully. She told herself she was gathering intelligence on her captor, for entirely practical reasons.
She told herself this several times over the following days.
She was becoming less convinced by it each time.
~ * ~
"Why didn't you ever marry?" she asked, that evening, in the comfortable territory of their eighth hour of chess that week.
He looked up from the board with the expression of a man who has been asked a question he considers irrelevant and interesting in equal measure.
"Who would have married me?" he said.
"That's not what I asked. You're — I'm sure there's been no shortage of options." She said this neutrally, as a fact, because it was one.
"There have been." He studied the board. "It would have been a transaction. That has never interested me." A pause. "My father's marriage was a transaction. I watched what it did to my mother."
Jane thought about this. "Is that why she — did she—"
"She died of pneumonia," he said. Simply. Flatly. With the particular flatness of a story told so many times it had been worn smooth of all its grief. "But she had stopped living well before that." He moved a piece. "I decided when I was nine that if I ever had something — someone — I would not make it a transaction. Or I would not have it at all."
Jane looked at the board and thought about a nine-year-old boy in this house watching his mother disappear and building himself into something impenetrable in response. She thought about how the most dangerous kind of armour was the kind you built when you were too young to know you were building it.
"Check," he said.
She looked down. He'd had her in three moves and she'd missed all of them.
"I was distracted," she said.
"I know," he said, and the quiet certainty of it made her look up, and for a moment the firelight was very warm and the room was very small and the distance between them across the chess table was something she was acutely, entirely aware of.
She moved her king.
"Good night, Dimitri," she said, and went to bed before she could do something unwise.