‘Do you want to find out?’
Demyan shook his head.
‘Then tell me from the beginning,’ Mikael said.
‘You don’t need to know all that.’
‘You want my advice?’ Mikael checked, and Demyan gave a reluctant nod. ‘Did you use protection?’
‘Always,’ Demyan said, then flinched a bit as he remembered what had happened with Alina. ‘Always, back then.’
‘But?’
‘Perhaps I did not use it wisely,’ Demyan admitted. He could barely remember that night with Nadia but there had been a torn condom and he might have gone in for a brief second before resheathing, he really han’t been able to remember details afterwards.
‘Now she says...’
‘I don’t care about now,’ Mikael said. ‘I want to know about then.’
Demyan did not want to think about then, about how then he had still thought in Russian, how his head had ached from a day speaking in English. How Nadia may well have used that weakness. ‘It was nice to speak in Russian, easy to end up in bed. By morning I was over her.’ Demyan took a belt of his drink. ‘A few weeks later she told me she was pregnant. I was a lot younger back then, I knew I had slept with her. I dealt with the consequence and we married.’
‘You never doubted her?’
‘No.’
‘Two years later, you divorced. Why?’
‘Because.’
It was impossibly hard for him to dissect it, to sit with Mikael when deep down he knew that there was nothing he could do to help.
He was desperate, that was all.
‘We divorced because the man with a promising future wasn’t delivering quickly enough.’
‘And...’
Demyan paused. Mikael was only the second person to ask him such direct questions. Alina was the other but he simply wasn’t ready to answer, even to himself.
‘Soon after the divorce I started to do well,’ Demyan said. ‘Then I started to do very well and Nadia wanted us to get back together. She still does. I have always said no.’
‘Always?’ Mikael checked. ‘I need the truth.’
‘Always,’ Demyan said. ‘When I am done with someone I don’t change my mind.’
‘How much do you pay her?’
‘What is right,’ Demyan said. ‘I don’t want to go into figures.’
But Mikael did. ‘Nadia has never worked a day in her life, she comes from the streets like us, so where is she getting the money to live as she does?’
‘Me,’ Demyan admitted. ‘I had a single mother, I did not want my son...’ He faltered. ‘She has raised him well.’
‘On your money.’
‘Of course.’