Claim
11
Kira ran a hand over the newly installed kitchen cabinets and paused, feeling again for the ding.
“Here,” she said to the big man standing next to her. “Near the top.”
Jan Zielinski, the kitchen contractor, bent to feel along the top of the cabinet, then pulled his hand away and bent for a closer look.
He sighed, straightening. “You’re right. Can we offer you a discount to keep it? It’ll take two more months to get a new one in.”
Kira worried her lip between her teeth. Her innate perfectionism made her want to refuse, to wait for an undamaged cabinet to be delivered so the kitchen would be perfect.
But she’d learned to be flexible during the tandem renovations of the house and Ludis. Sometimes things didn’t go as planned and it made more sense to work around a problem than to push through it.
Renovation was not unlike her husband in that way, and her face grew flush as she thought about Lyon’s tie between her lips a few nights before, the increasingly frenzied way he’d taken her every night since, as if to prove ownership over her body.
“Mrs. Antonov?” She looked up to find Jan staring at her, his eyes colored with worry. “Are you alright?”
She laughed nervously and brushed imaginary dirt off her jeans. “Oh, yes. I’m fine. I was just thinking. About the cabinet.” Why did her face feel like it was getting hotter? “You’re right. It makes more sense to live with this one than wait for another. The countertops are scheduled to be installed next week.”
That had been another thing she’d learned: if one piece of the renovation puzzle was delayed, it usually set off a cascading set of accompanying delays. Delaying the cabinet installation meant delaying the countertop installation which meant delaying the sink installation.
“I’ll make sure your account is credited for the damaged cabinet,” Jan said.
She smiled up at him. “That’s not necessary. The ding is hardly visible.”
She wanted everything to be perfect, but Jan’s business was a small, family-run one. She and Lyon didn’t need the credit for one cabinet.
“If you’re sure,” he said.
“I am. Thanks for taking a look.”
“Anytime.” He looked around the room. “It’s going to be quite a kitchen.”
She exhaled as she followed his gaze. It was a large space made to feel larger for the fact that she’d taken down the wall between it and the living room, and the larger windows she’d added at the back — together with two sets of French doors — flooded the room with light at all hours of the day, even in winter.
There was a large kitchen island, and she could already see herself preparing food there, maybe dropping cookie dough onto a sheet while the big double ovens preheated, a little one standing on a stool at her side.
She almost felt embarrassed thinking about it. Pregnancy was making her fanciful.
Or maybe it was her growing love for the man who occupied her mind and bed.
She said goodbye to Jan and made her customary pass through the house, checking in on the work that had been done in the past couple of days when she’d been focused on the work at Ludis.
The house was coming along. If she could keep the crews working overtime — and she would, whatever the cost — they would be able to move in before the baby was born.
She stopped in the music room, running her hand along the walls, all of them finally sealed and finished now that the acoustic material had been installed between the studs. Then she wandered into the living room and over to the piano.
She opened the cover protecting the keys and trailed her hands over the ivory, picking out the notes of “Clair de Lune”, one of four movements in the Suite Bergamasque. She’d always loved the fact that it had been inspired by a poem of the same name, and she let the haunting, melancholy notes wash over her as they traveled through the house.
She thought of Lyon as she played, of his fierce heart and the walls he’d built around it. She thought of the picture she’d found of him as a boy, the sad look in his eyes as he held onto the hand of the severe-looking woman Kira now knew to be Aksana.
Had he been lonely?