The Other Girl by Pam Jenoff Page A

son, features that were better suited to a man. Closer, Maria saw that the older woman held with shaking hands a photo of Piotr as a boy. Though cold and unemotional on the surface, Pani Adamczyk missed her son.
    Maria reached her hand out tentatively. “I’ll take care of the food,” Pani Adamczyk replied tersely before Maria could touch her shoulder to offer comfort. She did not want to share her sadness. “Now if you’ll just give me a moment...”
    As Maria retreated from the room, she was reminded of the sorrow that had colored her own childhood after Marek died from the grippe. Her parents continued to speak of the ten-year-old they had lost as though he might walk in the door at any moment. Marek had been brilliant. Marek had been beautiful—and funny, and kind, and on it went. It was clear that Maria could spend her whole life trying to compensate and never be close to enough. Many times over the years, Maria had wished she could, if not replace him, at least share in her parents’ memories and loss. But her brother was a stranger to her, no more than a shadowy image beyond the photographs and the occasional game in which she imagined him there playing dolls with her.
    Here, she knew Piotr and might have shared in his mother’s missing him. But no one had spoken of Piotr since he had left—it was as if he was already dead. Maria hesitated at the bedroom door, considering whether she should tell Pani Adamczyk that she was pregnant with Piotr’s child. But she was not sure whether that would make things better or worse, so she left.
    Maria recrossed the great room where Pan Adamczyk still snored. She walked toward the door, then pulled her coat from the hook and slipped outside, eager to escape the house for a bit. The mixed scent of coal smoke and manure rose to greet her. She shivered at the unexpected bite of the wind. A kind of warmth had lingered in the afternoons this December, a false promise to stave off winter. But with the sun down, the cold was unabashed, with a crispness that caused her breath to form puffs in front of her.
    Maria looked upward as she brushed her hair from her eyes. The sky was muted now, and clouds obscured the stars she had seen from the loft. She wondered again where Piotr might be, whether he had shelter or was sleeping out in the cold. Her concern for him felt real but distant. Should she be sadder about Piotr’s absence, like her mother-in-law? Maria scarcely knew her husband, and his touch was still that of a stranger. She hadn’t had time to decide how she really felt.
    In fact, she hadn’t wanted to accept Piotr’s proposal at all. She smiled, remembering how he had begun finding excuses to come by her father’s stables. The sudden interest of a boy she had known vaguely since childhood had surprised her. Now she glanced back at her reflection in the front window of the house quizzically, wondering why he had chosen her. Though she had Mama’s high cheekbones and delicately sloped nose, it was as if Papa’s pale coloring had put a dull filter atop them, a jarring contrast to her thick, dark hair. Piotr’s attention had been unexpected, like a small gift for no particular occasion. She knew, though, that he had already been engaged once to a former classmate, Ruth Nowak, something he’d dismissed vaguely as having “not worked out” when she’d asked. Maria hadn’t wanted to take from the other girl or be Piotr’s second choice.
    Maria’s hand traveled reflexively to her stomach, and a flicker of warmth and excitement passed through her. She had only been early on in her pregnancy so had not told Piotr about the child before he had left. Not that she thought he would have been upset. She had mentioned starting a family once in passing. “When we have children... That is, if you want them...”
    He’d shrugged and said, “I suppose.” To him, a wife and children