What Lives in Between

There are moments in life that split time in two.

Before and after.

Nikolai Voss had his before on a Tuesday. 

Quiet, unremarkable, the kind of Tuesday that had no business carrying what it carried. He was in his New York office on the forty-second floor of a building that had his name on it 

— not on the outside, he wasn’t that kind of man — 

but on the inside, on every door that mattered, on every contract that moved money the way rivers move water. 

Quietly, constantly, unstoppably.

It was 6:47 in the evening.

The Singapore deal was two signatures away from closing and the quarterly projections were open on his screen and everything was exactly where it was supposed to be. 

The city outside the glass was doing its usual thing — burning itself gold and violet at the edges the way it did every evening, indifferent and relentless and alive.

His phone rang.

Private number.

He almost did not pick up.

He had people for that. Layers of professional distance constructed specifically so that the unfiltered world could not reach him directly. And yet something made his hand move. 

“Mr. Voss.”

A careful voice, the kind people use when they are about to hand you something heavy.

“Speaking.”

“This is Dr. Patricia Owens from Lenox Hill Hospital. I’m calling regarding Elise Adler. We have you listed as her emergency contact, sir.”

He stopped looking at his screen.

“What happened.” Not a question. His voice didn’t do questions in moments like this.

“Mr. Voss, there was an accident this evening on the FDR Drive. A truck collision. Elise Adler and her husband were brought in by emergency services at approximately five forty-“ 

“Are they alive?” 

Silence. The kind with texture.

“Mr. Voss, I think it would be better if you could come in…”

“Are they alive?”

He heard her exhale.

“Mrs. Adler did not survive her injuries. She passed at six fifteen. Mr. Adler was in surgery when I placed this call and I’m.. I’m sorry to tell you that we lost him approximately five min…”

Everything else she said seemed to blur and fade away. He set the phone down 

Not hung up, set it down. Carefully, with both hands.

He sat there for a moment. 

The screen in front of him still showed the Singapore projections but he was far from it.

His assistant knocked and opened the door three inches.

“Mr. Voss, the Singapore contract just came through and Mr. Tanaka’s team is asking if—”

He turned around,

She stopped. Mid-sentence, her hand still on the door. Whatever was on his face made her stop

“Cancel everything,” His voice was completely even.

“Sir?”

“Everything. Tonight, tomorrow, the rest of the week.”

In four years she had never heard those words in that order. She nodded once and pulled the door shut without another word.

He was already reaching for his jacket

*****

He drove himself to the hospital.

Nikolai had Gerald for that

Gerald who had been his driver for eight years and who understood that silence in the car was preference not rudeness and had never once tried to fill it

He took his own car from the private garage — a black Porsche Panamera he kept mostly out of habit — and drove through early evening Manhattan with both hands on the wheel and an unnatural urge to speed and drive through every car he came across.

Elise.

His Elise. Thirty-one year old, who laughed too easily and loved too openly and had somehow survived the exact same childhood as him without becoming anything like him — which he had always considered either a miracle or a quiet accusation. 

Who called him every Sunday without fail and talked for forty minutes about everything and nothing while he sat at his desk pretending to work and listening to every single word. Who had married James — steady, kind, quietly funny James, who shook Nikolai’s hand at their first meeting and didn’t flinch at the coldness of it and had simply said good to finally meet you, I’ve heard a lot and smiled like he meant it.

Who had a daughter.

Ten years old.

Alia.

The name landed in his mind like a cold hand on his shoulder.

She is somewhere in this city right now and she doesn’t know yet.

****

The hospital was too bright the way hospitals always are. He walked to the reception, gave his name and signed papers.

He answered questions in a voice that remained completely even throughout. 

He was told that Alia had not been in the car. That she was home with her babysitter, and the babysitter had been contacted and was with her now.

He was taken to the doctor’s office, who apparently was saying things he heard but could not retain

“As for her daughter, we suggest that it’s best for a family member to break it to her, and let her process at her own pace. We have grief counsellors specialised—”

“I’ll take my leave now doc” Nikolai said.

**** 

He arrived at the mansion and parked in front of the entrance 

Maya — the babysitter, university student, three years of twice-weekly Alia duty — opened the door before he knocked. 

Eyes red. Held together by the effort of holding together.

“She’s been asking where her mum is,” she said quietly.

He nodded once and walked inside.

Alia was on the living room floor.

Cross-legged on the rug, pyjamas with small yellow stars, hair in two lopsided puffs. Holding a book but not reading it. She looked up when he came in and her face did the thing it always did — that complicated layered thing that was partly fondness and partly the particular wariness of a child who understands, instinctively, that some adults are harder to be around than others.

“Uncle Nico,

“Why are you here?”

He sat on the sofa across from her.

Her mother’s eyes. Completely, precisely her mother’s eyes.

“Alia,” he said.

“Where’s Mummy?” Entirely matter-of-fact. The voice of a child who hasn’t learned yet to be afraid of her own questions.

He told her. Simply. Clearly. No softening it past recognition because she deserved the truth in plain language.

He watched her face as he spoke. Watched her go very still — his kind of still, the kind he recognised from the inside. 

Her eyes fixed on his face without blinking nearly enough.

When he finished, the room was very quiet.

Alia looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the book in her hands. Then she set it on the rug very carefully, with both hands, the way you put something down when you are using all your effort on something else entirely.

“Both of them?” she asked, very quietly.

“Yes.”

“They’re not coming back.”

Not a question. She already knew. She was ten years old and she already knew and she was simply making him confirm it because she was that kind of child — the kind that looks directly at things.

“No,” he said.

She nodded once. Small. Precise.

Then she looked down at the rug and she went somewhere inside herself — somewhere sealed and very far away

She didn’t cry. Not a single tear. She just sat in her yellow star pyjamas on her mother’s too-colourful rug and became very still and very small and very unreachable.

He sat across from her for a long time after that. Not speaking, not moving, not knowing what to do with his hands.

He was a man who always knew what to do.

But he did not know what to do with this. 

****

They took him to a room at the end of a corridor.

White walls, fluorescent light. 

The specific cold of a place that is kept cold on purpose. 

A hospital staff member — young, kind-faced, clearly hating this part of his job — held the door open and said something about taking all the time he needed and then stepped back and let Nikolai walk in alone.

There were two of them. Side by side, covered to the shoulder the way they do it, the way that is supposed to be respectful and probably is but also makes everything very final in a way that hits you before you’re ready.

James first.

He looked at James for a moment. The quietly funny man who had shaken his hand at their first meeting without flinching. 

Who had loved his sister with a steadiness that Nikolai had respected without ever saying so. 

Who had once, at a Christmas dinner three years ago, leaned over and said 

“You know, she talks about you every day” 

And then gone back to his food like he hadn’t just handed Nikolai something enormous.

“James,” he said.

Just the name. Nothing else. There was nothing else that felt right.

Then he looked at Elise.

And that was different.

She looked smaller than she was supposed to. 

That was the thing he couldn’t get past, standing there in the cold white room. 

Elise had never been a small person. Not in any way that mattered. 

She had taken up space with an enthusiasm that occasionally embarrassed him and always, secretly, delighted him. 

She had been noise and warmth and the specific relentless energy of someone who had decided to live loudly because she’d seen what the alternative looked like and wanted no part of it.

She was very still now.

He stood there for a long time.

And then, because the room was cold and empty and there was no one to see it, he pulled the chair from the corner and sat down beside her and said nothing for a while. 

Just sat. 

The way she used to make him sit when she had something important to say and needed him to not be moving, not be working, not be anywhere except exactly there.

“Sit down, Nico. Just sit. The emails will still be there in ten minutes.”

He could hear her voice so clearly it was almost cruel.

He was thirteen the first time he understood what it meant to have a sister.

Not just to have one in the technical sense

But the meaning of her,

That came later.

He was thirteen and it had been a year since their father left and their mother was working double shifts at the hotel and they were alone in the apartment most evenings

The two of them, with whatever was in the fridge and whatever was on television and the particular silence of a home that used to have more people in it.

Elise was sixteen. She had made dinner. 

Pasta with a sauce from a jar that she had presented with considerable ceremony, setting the table with the good plates their mother only brought out for guests.

“Why are you using those plates,” he said.

“Because we’re guests,” she said. “Guests of each other. Sit down.”

He sat down. The apartment felt too big and too quiet.

“It’s good,” he said, after a moment.

“I know,” she said. “I made it.”

He looked at her across the table. 

Sixteen years old with their mother’s eyes and their father’s stubbornness and something entirely her own that neither of them had given her — something that refused, categorically, to become small even when everything around her was trying to make it so.

“Nico,” she said.

“What.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looked at his plate. “It’s the same answer.”

“It really isn’t.” She twirled her pasta. 

“You’ve been fine for twelve months. You were fine when he left. You were fine when Mama cried. You were fine on the first day of school when I could see from across the courtyard that you absolutely were not fine.”

“You were watching me from across the courtyard?”

“I’m your sister. I’m always watching.” She said it completely without embarrassment. 

“You can just say it’s hard, you know. I’m not going to fall apart.”

“I know you’re not.”

“So say it.”

“Elise—”

“Say it’s hard, Nico. Three words. I’ll even go first.” 

She set her fork down and looked at him directly, sixteen years old and completely unafraid of the conversation. 

“It’s hard. It’s really hard and I miss him even though I’m furious at him and I don’t know how to do both of those things at the same time. Your turn.”

He stared at her.

“It’s hard,” he said finally, very quietly.

“There,” she said. She picked her fork back up. “Was that so terrible?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Liar.” But she was almost smiling. “You know what your problem is?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“You think if you feel something, it means it beat you.” She pointed her fork at him with the authority of someone significantly older than sixteen. “Feeling things doesn’t mean you lost, Nico. It just means you’re a person.”

He said nothing.

“A very annoying person,” she added. “But still.”

“You’re sixteen,” he said. “When did you get like this?”

“I’ve always been like this. You just don’t pay attention.” She stood up and took her plate to the kitchen. “Next week I’m attempting risotto.”

He blinked at the subject change. “From a jar?”

“From scratch. I watched a video.”

“That’s going to be a disaster.”

“Probably,” she said, from the kitchen, completely unbothered. “You’ll eat it anyway.”

“I’ll eat it anyway,” he said.

And he meant it as more than just the risotto and she knew that and didn’t make him say so.

She never made him say the things he couldn’t say.

She just made sure he knew she already knew them.

He remembered the risotto.

It had been exactly as catastrophic as promised. 

Somehow simultaneously too thick and completely flavourless, which she had insisted was a deliberate artistic choice, which was a lie so confident he had very nearly believed it. He had eaten every bite. She had watched him do it from across the table with the expression of someone conducting an experiment.

“You don’t have to finish it,” she said.

“I know,” he said. And kept eating.

She had laughed. The real one — the full body unselfconscious one she never grew out of no matter how old she got— that he heard at the end of every Sunday phone call right before she said “Okay I have to go, James is making that face, I love you, bye” and hung up before he could respond.

She always hung up before he could respond.

He used to think it was because she was in a hurry.

Sitting in this room now he understood she had always known it was easier for him that way.

She had known everything about him that he never said out loud and she had loved all of it anyway and called back the following Sunday without fail and hung up before he had to answer and made terrible risotto and used the good plates because they were guests of each other and never once made him feel like his silence was a burden she resented carrying.

“Elise,” he said.

The room didn’t answer.

He stayed until the young staff member knocked softly on the door and told him gently that there was no rush, that he could come back, that they would take good care of them.

Nikolai stood up.

He straightened his jacket.

He walked out of the room and down the corridor and out into the October night and he did not look back because he had never been capable of looking back and Elise had known that about him too.

That was the part that was going to take the longest.

Knowing she had known all of it.

And had stayed anyway.