16
ANNA
I can’t sleep.
The entire night, I lie on top of the covers staring at the ceiling, turning over every version of the same conversation in my head. How do you tell four-year-olds that you lied to them? Not accidentally. Not once. Hundreds of times, in hundreds of small ways, every time they asked about their father and you told them he was gone, he was in heaven, he loved them, but he couldn’t be here.
Every version ends the same way.
By morning, I still don’t have the words.
I avoid Luca completely. Stay in my room until I hear his car leave for the office. Only then do I go to the twins’ rooms and push open their doors.
They’re already awake. Alexei is building something with blocks on his bedroom floor, focused and quiet. Mila is in her room arranging her stuffed animals in a row along the windowsill, assigning them seats with the authority of someone running a very small theater.
“Breakfast?” I ask.
“Can we have the thick pancakes?” Mila asks.
“Not today. Come on.”
We eat in the small dining room. The twins chatter about their plans for the morning. Mila wants to go to the garden. Alexei wants to work on his train track. I nod at the right moments, push food around my plate, and think about what comes after breakfast.
“You’re not eating,” Alexei says.
“I’m fine.”
He looks at me the way he does when he doesn’t believe me but has decided not to push. Then he goes back to his food.
After breakfast, I take them to the playroom. Let them settle into their things. Mila goes straight to her dollhouse. Alexei pulls out his train set and starts connecting pieces with the focused efficiency of someone who has a plan and intends to execute it.
I sit on the floor with them and watch them play and wait for Luca.
He appears in the doorway at ten o’clock exactly. “Can I join you?” he asks.
Neither of the twins answers immediately. They look at me.
“It’s okay,” I tell them.
Luca walks in and sits down on the floor across from them. Cross-legged, at their level. It’s such a deliberate thing, a man like him folding himself onto a playroom floor, that both twins stop what they’re doing and look at him properly.
He’s nervous. I can see it in the set of his shoulders. The careful way he’s holding himself still.
“I want to tell you something,” he says. “Something important.”
Mila sets her doll down. Alexei puts his hands in his lap.
“You know how your mama told you I was your stepfather when you first moved here?”
They nod.
“That’s not right.” He pauses and looks at them both. “I’m your father. Your real father.”
The room goes completely quiet.
Mila stares at him. “But our daddy died. Mama said he went to heaven.”
“I know that’s what you were told. But I didn’t die. I’ve been here the whole time.”
