12
VALYA
Isee him before he sees me because winter wastes nothing. Footprints hold their edges and even sound carries farther than it should. Ghosts do not.
For three days, he is everywhere I'm not supposed to look—a reflection in a bakery door, a shape at the end of a block I cross without hesitation, the suggestion of a coat at the turn of a corner. It is not romantic. It is annoying in the way a song you used to love becomes a pill. I tell myself I'm imagining him because memory is thrifty and has good aim. It uses a reflection, a coat shape, and a corner and calls it a man. The small parish off Myrtle, where my grandmother used to pray and where Father Gavril keeps hours and icons hang low, sits just outside our perimeter. Aleksandr waiting there is a dare, not romance. It is the exact place a story would put a test.
Snow falls, slow and fat, the kind that keeps what it catches. It settles on his shoulders and on a hat he never wore when he was a boy with ambition. Now, he dresses like a man of forms and signatures. Same cologne, cedar with a sweetnessthat burns a little at the end, a bottle chosen to be expensive and remembered. Same mouth, soft at the corners to make promises slide. He knows how to stand under a streetlamp.
"Valya," he says, and the old name wants to be an endearment, but it sounds like a hand checking a lock.
"Aleksandr," I answer, and I'm pleased that my voice is steady. I set my back to the chapel door because I like the feel of oak behind me. The icon inside lives at my shoulder height, and I'm not above borrowing courage.
"I heard," he says, stepping closer as if the snow were a curtain meant to reveal him. "About the engagement. A farce. Your father is desperate. This is a performance in a church you don't even believe in anymore."
He speaks softly, like he is still the boy who stole afternoons with me under the shadow of scaffolding and made me feel like fire, except fire in those days had no work to do. There is something new in his gaze now, a slickness he thinks looks like confidence. My grandmother would have sniffed and said,Oil on ice.
"It is not your business," I say. I could say more. The sentences crowd behind my teeth, then discipline walks them back into the room and shuts the door.
"Everything about you is my business," he says, and it has the ring of a line he has rehearsed in another mirror in another city."Your father has made a mistake. Dmitri is dangerous. He will turn you into…" He pauses as if searching for a word that might get him back what he dropped. "Into a symbol." He lets the last syllable land softly, like a blanket over a question he doesn't want me to ask.
I'm loyal by habit and by will. I hate the Bratva when it is cruel, and I will defend the parts that remember a vow is sacred and a bargain is for sale. I hear my father's voice arguing with God in the chapel and Dmitri's low order on the terrace when his hand closed over a problem and taught it manners. Aleksandr calls Dmitri dangerous as if it is news. He has never understood how roofs work.
"And how would you know about the engagement?" I ask. A test. "You and my father don't share confidences, last I checked."
"Boston is small," he says, smiling like a man who has mistaken a rumor for power. He breathes out and lets the cologne do half the work. He is still the golden boy in an expensive coat, his smile crooking just enough to taunt without giving me anything to hold. "People talk. A poor, sad house clinging to old ways. Candles and Latin and a puppet in a black suit."
"Church Slavonic," I say, because if he wants to mock a thing, he should at least name it correctly. "Latin is for the other neighbors."
He doesn't smile at that because the joke doesn't love him. He steps close enough that the snow in his hair melts along the line of his jaw and leaves a shine. "You don't belong to this," he says with the voice that once taught me how to ignore the forecast and take the umbrella anyway. "Come with me for a coffee. Ten minutes. I have so much to tell you."
"Ten minutes to tell me what?" I ask because I don't refuse cleanly when part of me wants the argument. I learned that from the men in my family.
"That I can help," he says. "That you don't have to pretend to be a statue on a staircase. That there is work in New York that suits you. I know you still run that baby program at the center." His eyebrow tilts like he is offering me back a piece of myself I forgot. "You always loved the babies."
I don't move. My throat goes cold. It is not the weather. He left before there was any program at all. The work came after, when I came back from New York with a silence I could not spend, when winter was a room and I needed a door. It grew out of mismatched cribs and donated formula. Reza and a handful of trusted people know it breathes. I did not tell him. I don't give men in glass offices what belongs to a basement.
"How do you know that?" I ask, and the sentence drops between us like a brick into clear water.
He lifts one shoulder, easy. "I hear things," he says. "A man who cares keeps track of what his girl loves."
His girl. The two words rub the wrong way along my ribcage. I step back until the chapel door says stop. I fold my arms because I have nothing else to do with my hands that wouldn't escalate this into a scene I will have to admit to later.
The snow collects on our shoulders like patience.
"I'm not your girl," I say. "Not now. Not then, if we are honest about it."
He flinches, so small most people would miss it, and then the softness pours back over his face like a trained trick.
"Valya," he says again, shaping the syllables as if I'm still the girl who wanted to be a saint and a match at the same time.
"Come on. This" —he gestures vaguely in the direction of Beacon Hill— "this makes you smaller than you are."
"You mistook quiet for small." I meet his eyes until the charm blinks first.
There is a line between protection and control, and I have spent my entire life walking it in expensive shoes I did not ask for. My core wound is practical. Being loved means being owned.
Aleksandr carries ownership in the tilt of his chin. He was always good at it, even before the alliance ring that bought him streets. Dmitri guards like a vow he keeps close. He shows it when it matters. Neither house, ownership, nor oath is easy to live in.
