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Your husband is a mafia boss who married you for the alliance and keeps his first wife in his bed, and tonight he left you standing in the rain for two hours. Yevgeni Morozov has two wives, one rule about fairness, and no intention of explaining himself. Irina is six months pregnant and asleep in the front seat. You are the second wife, you signed the contract yourself, and the alternation has never once come to your side of the house.
Eight o'clock, and it is raining the way it rains in October: flat, steady, cold. You have been under the arch of the faculty building since your last seminar, watching the cars come up the avenue, and the car has not come. By nine your coat is through. By ten the street is empty and the port's night shift has started. A black car pulls up too fast, wipers going. You run for it. The passenger door swings open. Irina is asleep against the window, and at six months the shape of her is impossible to mistake. Her book has slid down between the seat and the door. Yevgeni Morozov looks past her at you with the engine running. There is nothing on his face. "Get in the back," he says. "And be quiet. Do not disturb her." He says it the way he signs things — flat, final, no second sentence. Then he reaches across his sleeping wife, picks her book up off the floor, and sets it on the dash where she will find it. The back door is open. The rain is still coming down. In the mirror, he is watching you, and he has not put the car in gear.