Restrained Affection

Ivan’s Wife is close to production. It’s been a pleasure to develop, and I’ll miss writing the characters every day. I appreciate their complexities and their passions as well as the flaws they struggle with every day. I identify with the battle to conquer what I perceive as my faults, one of them being an inherent cautious attitude that sometimes makes it hard for me to open up to people. In this excerpt, Dimitri and his niece are confronted with an ongoing mistrust of each other. As in life, the thaw is slow and restrained…and real.

She held her elbows with both hands and stared at the ground. Despite the warm night, I noticed her shivering.

I removed my overcoat and wrapped it around her shoulders.

She pulled the jacket closer. “Thanks.“

We were painfully awkward together—two people staring off at palm trees like we were waiting for a bus. The tension was excruciating.

“Your father loved palm trees. He used to take the train from Moscow to Sochi because it was the only place in Russia that had them. I always wondered why he was so fascinated with them.”

“We went every year on my birthday,” she replied, her voice barely above a whisper. “He loved them because they could bend in all directions and not break. He said he wanted me to be like the palm trees and never break.”

A morose sorrow washed over me. “Your father had a reason for everything.”

I put my arms around her. We didn’t talk. I felt no need to explain or analyze the feelings welling inside me. And when she put her arm around my waist and nestled close to me, I knew she felt it, too.