"Your sister was in an impossible position," I say. "She watched a brother who was cruel to her be protected by a father who was cruel to both of you. She watched a man more powerful than her father walk into her house, and she made a choice. Not a betrayal, a calculation. She weighed the cost of staying against the cost of leaving and decided that the people who were supposed to protect her had forfeited the right to her loyalty."
Katya is very still.
"Was she right?" I continue. "That depends on what you mean by right. Was she justified? Absolutely. Was it brave? Enormously. Did it cost her?" I hold her gaze. "It cost her everything, including you."
Something moves through her expression. Something vulnerable and old.
"I hated her," Katya says quietly. "When it happened. I was so angry. Not because she betrayed Sergei. I knew what he was. We all knew. But because she left and I couldn't. Because she got out and I was still there, and suddenly I wasn't just the dutiful daughter. I was the only daughter. All of his expectations, all of his resentment, everything he'd been spreading across two daughters collapsed onto one."
"Onto you."
"Onto me." She looks down at the book in her lap, but I don't think she's seeing it. "And the worst part is, I understood why she did it. Even then, kneeling in that living room watching her walk out with Gennady Petrov, some part of me understood. I just couldn't forgive her for it."
The silence between us is heavy with the kind of truth that only surfaces when someone feels safe enough to let it.
"Have you thought about seeing her?" I ask.
Katya's head comes up sharply. "What?"
"Matilda. Have you thought about reaching out?"
"I — no. I can't. My father would—" She stops. I watch her hear herself, watch the old programming collide with the new understanding, and I wait.
"Your father," I say carefully, "doesn't get to decide who you speak to anymore."
She stares at me. The words seem to rearrange something behind her eyes.
"She's your sister, Katya. Not his asset, not a symbol of shame, not a cautionary tale. Your sister. And if what you've told me is true, that you understood why she left, that you knew what Sergei was, then the only thing standing between you and her is a narrative your father wrote to justify his own failure."
"He'd be furious."
"He is irrelevant."
A long pause. She worries her bottom lip, the habit I've learned to read as active processing rather than anxiety, and I resist the urge to cross the room and pull it free with my thumb the way I want to. The way she'd probably let me now.
"What if she doesn't want to see me?" Katya asks, and beneath the composure I hear it, the voice of a woman who lost her sister and never grieved it because grief wasn't permitted.
"Then at least you tried. But she lost you too. And from everything I’ve heard about Matilda, she didn't leave because she stopped caring about her family. She left because her family never cared about her."
Katya is quiet for a while. I let the silence do its work. Outside the window, the garden moves in the breeze, and the afternoon light shifts across the floor in slow, gold increments.
"Could we..." she begins, then stops. Starts again, with more certainty. "Could we visit? Would that be possible? Gennady Petrov is — I mean, diplomatically, is that—"
"Petrov and I have no quarrel. His wife's family is my wife's family. A visit between sisters is personal, not political." I pause. "I'll arrange it if you want."
"Yes please." The words come quickly, before she can change her mind.
"Then I'll make the call."
She nods. Then unfolds herself from the chair, crosses the room, and kisses me. Soft, quick, almost shy, despite the fact that every night this woman dug her nails into my back hard enough to leave marks and whisperedmorein my ear with a conviction that nearly finishes me on the spot.
"Thank you," she says against my mouth.
"For what?"
"For being you."
She returns to her chair. Picks up her book. And I sit across from her and feel the weight of what just happened settle into the quiet between us — another door, another choice, another piece of Katya Lazovskia becoming Katya Orlova.
