“I know.”
He thinks about this. “Did you know he wasn’t dead?”
I can’t lie to him. Not now. Not after all of it. “Yes, baby. I knew.”
His face does something small and painful. “So you told us something that wasn’t true. On purpose.”
“Yes.”
Mila has lifted her head from Luca’s shoulder. She’s looking at me now too. Both of them are looking at me with the same expression, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to hold.
“Why?” Mila asks. Her voice is very small. “Why would you say our daddy was dead if he wasn’t?”
“Because I was scared. I was trying to protect you.”
“From Daddy?”
“I thought so. At the time.”
Mila looks at Luca. Then back at me. “But he’s nice to us.”
“I know he is.”
“So why were you scared of him?”
I don’t have an answer that fits inside words a four-year-old can hold. I don’t have an answer that doesn’t make me sound like a woman who made choices she can’t fully justify to the people most affected by them.
“I was wrong to be scared,” I say finally. “And I was wrong to lie. Both of those things are true.”
Mila slides off Luca’s lap. She walks to me slowly, stands in front of me, and looks at my face for a long moment with those blue eyes that are my eyes.
Then she climbs into my lap and puts her arms around my neck and holds on.
I hold her back. Press my face into her hair. “I’m sorry, baby,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
She doesn’t say it’s okay. She’s four, not foolish. She just holds on.
Alexei hasn’t moved from beside Luca. He’s looking at the train car in his hand, turning it over, thinking. “Is everything true now?” he asks. “Are you going to tell us true things from now on?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “Everything true from now on.”
He turns the train car over one more time. Then he sets it on the track in front of him, pushes it forward, and watches it go. “Okay,” he says.
Just that. Okay. The particular forgiveness of a child who has decided to move forward because moving forward is better than staying in the hurt. The kind of forgiveness that costs them something, even at four years old, and that I will spend a long time trying to be worthy of.
Luca catches my eye across the room.
He doesn’t say anything. Neither do I.
17
LUCA
Mila cried that first evening,then climbed into Anna’s lap and stayed there. Alexei went quiet for a day and a half, the thinking kind of quiet, and this morning he came downstairs and asked me to help him with his train track like nothing had happened.
I’ll take it.
Pavel walks into my office without knocking. “We have a problem,” he says.
