She clasps her tiny hands together in glee. “Okay, a secret.” And then she gives me a nose boop before scampering out of the office.
The blinds in the office are half closed against the late afternoon sun. Matvey is perched on the windowsill. Nikolai is flicking through a file. And Grigory sits behind the desk, texting his sister.
No one speaks.
I line up the three coasters on the edge of the desk until they’re parallel. Grigory lets me do this. He always has.
He clears his throat. “You sent a message,” he finally prompts, setting his phone down. “You want to talk?”
I hate that word.Talk. I prefer action to words. But Sofia’s book is still where we left it, and the world hasn’t imploded yet, so I have to try to do this…
I clear my throat. “I told Sofia,” I say. “In front of you all.”
“We were there,” Matvey says.
“But you three didn’t…say anything. It was over a week ago, and you still haven’t reacted.”
“Did you want us to throw confetti?” Nikolai asks, deadpan.
“What do you need from us, Vik?” Grigory asks.
The question lands like a weight on top of me.
I look at the coasters to keep my voice from catching. “When we were younger,” I say slowly, “did you know that I wasn’t like you? You know, because of the way I needed things to be a certain way.”
Matvey snorts. “You mean how you alphabetized the crates and stabbed me when we were fifteen because I tried to move a box from B to C?”
“It was a system, Matvey. You were fucking it up.”
“I’magreeingwith you,” he says.
Grigory meets my gaze for a split second. “We knew.”
Nikolai nods. “Maybe not the exact word, but yeah, we knew.”
I make myself look each of them in the eye. “And you don’t mind?”
“Mind what?” Grigory asks.
“That I have…autism.”
Matvey’s expression softens. “Vik, we’ve known you’reyouthe whole damn time.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Then here’s your answer,” Grigory says, planting his hands on the desk. “No. We don’t mind. We mind when you’re in pain and don’t tell us. We mind when you struggle and don’t let us help.”
Nikolai grunts. “Or when you reorganize the kitchen knives, then watch us whenever we go near them like we might be setting a bomb off.”
“They need to point the same way,” I say in defense of myself.
“Yeah, we learned that eventually,” Nikolai replies.
Matvey comes around the desk. “We were idiots when we were young. We didn’t understand how some of this shit bothers you. But we always knew what mattered, Vik.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like you were always there for us,” he says. “You were the first to move when someone else froze. You would keep a promise even if it broke you in half.”
