36
CLAIRE
Anya paused in the middle of the song on the piano. Her fingers glided like magic over the keys in a way I’d never be able to learn.
I lifted my head to smile at her, curious why she’d stopped.
This ballroom was “hers”, or it seemed like it. When she played, the music took over the whole grand space.
“What was your mother like?” she asked, catching me off guard.
I sighed. “She was incredible.”
Every day, we learned a little more about each other. I’d ask about her interests, help her with the tutoring, or she’d try to teach me how to play bits of songs. On the days when we didn’t have anything to do, the days when she didn’t have work to turn in, we just hung out. She was too young to be a friend but too old to mother and try to parent.
Trespassing and acting like a mother wasn’t my goal. But I couldn’t help but pick up on how she might be coming to view me as a stand-in like that.
“She was a very wise and practical woman,” I told her, thinking back to the few times she’d ever been disappointed in me or when she’d lectured me about how I’d made a bad choice.
If she were alive, there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d approve of my being with Mikhail or associating with any of the Orlovs.
My father would’ve been even harder to persuade into accepting him. If it ever could’ve been possible.
Telling Anya about my mother pleased me, but the more I talked about her, the more I realized how I would’ve faced more challenges to choose love if she were still around. Her disappointment and shock would have been more prominent forces against my being with this strong man who’d saved me. And it saddened me that her rigid sense of morality could have once seemed like a guiding light in my life but would have also been a huge restraint to my happiness.
“Was she stricter than your father?” Anya asked later, pausing between her light playing on the keys.
“Oh, no.” I shook my head. “He was a very stern and serious man.”
“Would he have liked my father?” she asked.
I winced. “Not at all. To him, there were only two kinds of people in the world. Good or bad. And it wasn’t often that he’d be convinced someone could be both. Or neither.”
Dammit. You’re really putting me on the spot with these questions.
I suspected that she wasn’t asking me these questions to pry or be nosy. We weren’t strangers anymore, and she was aware ofthe fact that my family was gone, and I was equally aware that her “former” family was gone too.
She seemed to be asking me as a way of making a comparison to how she’d view her father. Hopefully, with the interest in getting closer to him.
I didn’t push. I never went to the extreme of suggesting she try to talk to him. This was something that she’d need to figure out at her own pace.
I would help however I could, though. Because while Mikhail wasn’t the most expressive man with his emotions, perhaps holding them in check because of his role, he did care. I saw how much his family mattered to him, even Anya with the distance between them.
“No,” I replied bluntly, secure in my role here so I could be free to answer as honestly as I could. “Iknowmy father wouldn’t have liked yours. He wouldn’t have liked my being his girlfriend, either.”
She played, nodding along to what I said to indicate she was listening. I bet she wasn’t wanting to make direct eye contact because talking about Mikhail was that hard for her.
“My father would’ve been pissed,” I admitted. “He would’ve ranted and railed that he’d raised me better than this. That I had to be out of my mind to want to date and live with a man almost twice my age, a Mafia boss, someone who’s been hardened by a life of crime.”
She stopped playing and faced me. “And that didn’t stop you from staying?”
“Well, I did try to leave. I thought I could extract myself from the situation and fly back home to get away fromallof these Mafia men.” I shook my head. “But that was only the fear ruling me, the intimidation I couldn’t shake at the unknowns.” Taking her hand, I tried to be as gentle and honest as I could. “There will always be evil in this world, Anya, bad people doing bad things. It is simply part of human nature. But there is nothing just in classifying someone asonlybad or irredeemable. When I was captured, I learned that cruel lesson, especially when cops were just as crooked and unable to help me, and they trapped me. I learned even more when another doctor, someone like me who’d taken an oath to help people, deviated to such evil.”
“And that’s what convinced you that my father can’t be any worse than the others?”
I shook my head. “No. It convinced me to learn to adjust and not be so rigid with what I believed growing up.” Giving her more examples of how her father wasn’tonlya bad man seemed to give her more to think about. In the end, I could only share what I thought and felt. Still, as an outsider, I could be more objective. “So, no, my father wouldn’t have approved of Mikhail. But he was also the kind of closed-minded person who would never think a police officer could be capable of wrong-doing, that another doctor or any other professional could be just as shady and terrible as men in any Mafia family.”
She let out a deep exhale, pensive and letting her shoulders sag.
