She nods because she is practical, even when she hates the plan. She gets up and stirs a pot she doesn’t need to stir. Motion is medicine too.
My mother says they watched a dog in the park today. We laugh in the soft way you laugh after a long day. We clean up. Baths. Pajamas with clouds. A board book twice because once isn’t enough. We put them down and stand in the doorway to make sure their breathing takes the shape of sleep. It does. The monitor glows a calm green.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” my mother says.
“Sleep in your room?—”
“I’d rather be here in case that front door gets kicked in.”
I can’t argue against that.
She pulls a blanket from the closet and shakes it out. She tucks a pillow into the corner like she plans to wrestle it. She looks small and stubborn and entirely mine. I have her hair, though her reddish brown is going gray. I have her eyes too—blue with too many brown flecks in them.
The only things I got from Dad are the big feet and a taste for danger. He was an accountant by day and a motorcycle racer by night. He said it was for extra money for the family, but it was for the thrills, and we all knew it.
I set my bag by the door next to the stroller. I check the deadbolt and the chain. I check the windows even though they hate to open. My nighttime routine is the barest comfort, but I’ll take what I can get.
In bed I stare at the ceiling and let the day unspool. Work. Trains. A man across a street. A man across a club. I think aboutwhat I owe myself and what I owe the two small people asleep in the next room. I make two lists in my head of things I can control and things I can’t. The first list is short. The second tries to be a book. I close it.
I don’t know what to do next. That is the truth. I say it out loud because secrets turn heavy when they sit inside. Tomorrow I will get up. I will wear the forest-green dress. I will take the train. I will do my job. I will watch corners. I will come home. I will keep breathing until the next problem appears.
And if I see Vitaly Ekimov, I run.
4
ROMAN
I keep the office cold.It suits my mood.
Vitaly is my only son. People keep offering that sentence like it solves anything. Family tradition would make him my heir because he exists and because his blood is mine. Fyodor likes tradition. He believes it has kept worse men from making worse choices.
I use it when it serves me. I set it aside when it doesn’t.
Vitaly takes after his mother. Quick hands, quicker temper. The urge to kill. Her cold green eyes, staring back at me when he raised his gun through the car window…
I keep replaying the night he tried to kill me. I fired first. He ran. The only part that surprises me is that he didn’t finish the job.
It wasn’t kindness that stayed his hand. It was calculation. He knows Fyodor has been pushing me to anoint him as my successor. If there was a cross fire that killed him, Vitaly wouldn’t have anyone in his corner anymore.
Fyodor loved Vitaly when he was a boy. He called himvolchok, little wolf. He told me a wolf needs training, not taming. I told him a wolf in a house learns when not to bite. That was our first argument about my son.
It lasted years, and even now, I see it in his eyes when he tells me the boy should inherit my position.
Fyodor took Vitaly for his first trip to the range. He learned to strip a pistol with his eyes closed. He grinned when metal clicked right where it belonged. Fyodor clapped his shoulder like a coach with a champion.
I stood behind them and felt the ground tilt. The grin was not pride. It was appetite. Bridgette’s appetite. Fyodor thought it could be honed.
It should have been starved.
Fyodor told him a pakhan must be a father to his people and a knife to his enemies. He left out the part where a good father hides the knife until there is no other way. Vitaly took the wrong lesson from his speeches, choosing the knife over everything else.
This was the fight between us for years. Fyodor thought Bridgette left a dangerous spark in our son and a forge would make it useful. I told him that spark would burn our house down.
We did not stop loving each other while we argued. He is still my second father. He still believes my blood should inherit because that is how the family stories go. The old man is naïve, and I fear that naivety will end badly for him.
Over the years, Vitaly’s taste for cruelty wore down Fyodor’s defense of him. My son hurts things that do not fight back. He lies even when the truth would cost less. He once pushed a disabled friend into a half-frozen river and called it a joke.
I saw Fyodor’s face change that day. He started telling Vitaly no. But it was too late. You can’t give absolute freedom, then expect rules to be followed.
