“I’m making tea.”
“The kettle takes three minutes. You can’t give your own ma three minutes? Sit.”
I sat, because Saoirse Orlova raised me to understand the difference between a request and an order, and that one was very clearly an order. She watched me over the rim of her mug, something dark and herbal that smelled faintly of damp earth. Her eyes had that particular look they get when she has been thinking about something for days and has finally decided it’s time to say it out loud.
“You care about her,” she said.
It wasn’t a question. My mother rarely wastes time on those.
“She’s my wife.”
“That’s not what I said.” She tilted her head slightly, studying me with the quiet patience she’s always had when dealing with stubborn sons. “I said you care about her. The tea. The sheet. The way you watch her when she doesn’t know you’re looking.” The kitchen light caught the silver threading through her dark hair. “You think I don’t notice, but I’ve been reading you since before you could talk. You’ve never looked at anyone the way you look at her.”
I didn’t respond. Mostly because she was right, and partly because anything I said would give her ammunition I wasn’t ready to hand over.
The kettle clicked behind me. I stood and poured the water over the teabag, watching steam curl upward in thin white spirals.
“I’ve heard things,” she said quietly. “About the Lazovskis.”
I kept my attention on the mug in my hands. “What kind of things?”
“That the father is… difficult.” She chose the word carefully, the way she always chooses her words. “That after the son died and the eldest daughter left, things got worse. That he blamed everyone except himself and took it out on whoever was closest.”
The tea had steeped too long. I pulled the bag and dropped it in the sink.
“But rumors are rumors,” she continued after a moment. “Half of them are projection, and the rest are gossip.”
She paused.
“Then I met her.”
I turned at that.
My mother’s expression had changed. Not pity, Saoirse Orlova doesn’t do pity, but something that lived close to grief. Theparticular grief of a mother Recognising the damage another parent has done to their own child.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, Killian,” she said quietly. “The way she checks your face before she eats. Before she sits down. Before she speaks. The way she flinches when a door closes too hard and then immediately pretends she didn’t.”
She set her mug down with a soft sound against the table.
“That’s not rumor,” she said. “That’s systematic. That’s a man who spent twenty years dismantling his own child until there was nothing left but obedience.”
The kitchen fell very quiet.
“I know,” I said.
“You know, and you’re handling it.” Her gaze flicked briefly toward the mug in my hand. “The tea. The distance. Giving her space without making the space feel like abandonment. You’re doing it right.”
“I don’t know if I’m doing it right,” I admitted. “I’m doing what feels right, and those aren’t always the same thing.”
“This time they are.”
She stood then and carried her mug to the sink with the unhurried calm of someone who has survived far worse than this and come out the other side intact.
“Your father was a complicated man,” she said as she rinsed the cup. “But he taught you boys one thing well. You don’t break what you want to keep.”
She paused beside me and squeezed my arm, the same brief, steady gesture she’d given Katya on the first night.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she said. “Iris too. That girl already adores her. And Grace, when she’s not busy growing your nephew.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “Katya has more people in her corner than she realizes.”
