“He was a grown man who made his own choices. Yes, you and his mother influenced him, but he was still responsible for all the bullshit he did as an adult. Don’t pretend he was your puppet who was helpless to your whims, because if he was, you and I have a problem.”
I snort a laugh at that. “Certainly not. But how much of one’s actions are due to your blood and how much are due to how you were raised?”
“I’m pretty sure people have been debating that since the dawn of history, and I don’t think we’re about to definitively answer that question at three in the morning.”
I know she’s right. She’s always right. It’s mildly infuriating, but also a comfort. “I suppose that’s true.” I kiss her hair. I taste shampoo and something addictive and sweet that belongs only to her. “They will not be like him.”
“No. They will not. We won’t allow it. His life is not their destiny, Roman.” She settles again. The silence is a blanket laid over a day that agreed to lie down. I listen for the truck on the far road that always passes at half after three. Mina does not move. Her breathing deepens into that steady pattern that says her body trusts this minute. I close my eyes to listen better.
We drift. Minutes loosen their grip. So does the fear. I curl around her body and take a face full of hair for my troubles. I don’t mind it, though.
“Sorry I woke you when I got up earlier.”
“Mmflp.” A moment later, her soft snore weighs me down.
Vitaly’s life is not my sons’ destiny. They will be their own men, and with luck, they will find their soul mate easier than I found mine.
31
MINA
A low rumblingsound startles me. I blink in the early morning light and try to find the source of it. Almost no cars come this way, and certainly not this early. It’s to the left of me, though, and that’s where the window sits?—
That’s Roman’s side of the bed.
Oh my god, he’s snoring. Since when does he snore?
He’s on his back, mouth half-open, forearm over his forehead. His body is the most relaxed I think I have ever seen him. The muscles in his face are totally slack, and when I pick up his other arm to test it, it drops straight down.
The man is completely unconscious to the world.
His nightmare son is dead. A month of reassurances from me might have finally cracked into his thick skull. And last night’s sex was…it shifted something inside of me. Maybe it did that for him too.
I slide on a robe and pad downstairs. It’s very early to be up, but I like stealing the small hours of the morning for myself.
Water pulls through the coffee grounds and fills the kitchen with a smell that means a new day is on its way. I lean on the counter and watch the stream turn from thin to dark. The machine makes a choking sound as it finishes. Mug. Spoon. Sugar, I keep swearing off. Cream, I never will.
A month ago, I flinched at every noise—the clack of the machine, the refrigerator’s cough, a car outside, a distant dog’s bark. Today, I set the mug down and nothing jumps inside me. The absence of panic is its own sound.
I sip. Heat sits on my tongue. I’m not primed for the next startle. My lungs fully inflate when I breathe.
It feels odd to be this relaxed.
Accepting what happened has been strange. For more than a year, Vitaly haunted my corners. He left me alone through most of the pregnancy, but that didn’t stop his ghost from haunting me for those months. Abuse worms its way into your brain and nibbles at the parts you thought were yours, even after it’s over. It has echoes.
And when he started his bullshit in full again, he threatened my mother. Our sons. He tried to kill Roman. And me. Did unspeakable things to other people. It didn’t last long, but a short reign of terror is still a reign of terror.
And now, it’s over.
Since I began dating him, my nervous system was primed for conflict and problems centered around Vitaly. I spent so much energydealing with him. Now, all that energy has to go somewhere else. Or, so I thought.
But the truth is, I live in a world without him, and all that energy is just…gone. The stressed-out part of my brain is like a partially deflated balloon. I thought for sure I’d redirect that frenetic energy to my boys or myself or my marriage, but I don’t have it anymore. It’s something I needed to protect myself, and now that I don’t have to do that, it left me.
I am so fucking happy about that, and that in and of itself feels wrong. A man is dead. There should be mourning or something, shouldn’t there? He was a human being.
Mostly.
Roman is calm about it. That calm unsettled me at first. I worried calm meant cold. It doesn’t. He was ready to let the law take Vitaly, ready to make the system hold him. But after Vitaly threatened me and our boys to Roman’s face, there was nothing left to debate.
