I was stubborn back then. Bitter. Wounded in ways I didn’t want to acknowledge. They, in turn, were exhausted—tired of dealingwith me, tired of my harsh edges, tired of the endless wall I built between us.
But then I came back from Russia and realized life was too short to hold life-long grudges. Trauma has a way of reshaping a person, of stripping them down to their barest truths. And mine was that I no longer wanted to live life on my own.
The anger that had once kept me warm at night suddenly felt too heavy to carry. The distance I’d clung to as a shield suddenly seemed like a punishment, one I’d inflicted on myself just as much as them.
And so, little by little, I let go.
It started with Lettie, hesitant conversations over the phone that turned into visits over school breaks. Then my mother’s fragile attempts at kindness, awkward but genuine, and my stepfather’s tentative branch of truce. Even the house itself, once a reminder of everything I hated, started to feel less like a cage and more like a chance at something resembling peace.
Now, years later, I live with them. Not as the bitter girl I used to be, but as a mother myself, raising a little boy who deserves more than fractured families and unspoken resentments.
My first yearas a mother nearly swallowed me whole. Sleepless nights bled into endless days, hours dragging and collapsing into each other until time itself felt meaningless.
There were mornings when I couldn’t pry my eyes open, when my body ached from exhaustion so deep it felt carved into my bones. Still, I’d hear that tiny wail every hour, raw and insistent, pulling me from whatever shallow fragments of sleep I’d managed to steal.
With no partner to roll over and share the burden alongside, no father to rock him at three a.m. while I prepped the bottle, no steady hand to take over when mine were shaking.
I had no plan. Only this fragile, beautiful little boy who needed me more than I had ever thought I could be needed. He came with no guidebook, just hungry cries, fevered nights, and tiny fists that curled instinctively around my finger as if to remind me that I couldn’t let go.
And when I looked down at him—God, it broke me.
Because he had his father’s eyes. That same steel-gray stare, softened with the round innocence of an infant. When his mouth pressed into a pout, I saw the echo of Maksim there too in that same stubborn, unyielding line. The shadow of a man who had left this world far too soon, leaving only this little piece of himself behind.
A piece I both cherished and grieved over.
Every time Leo smiled, I ached. Every time he reached for me, my chest pulled tight with love and sorrow all at once. He was proof that Maksim hadn’t been a dream, that what happened in Moscow was real, even if the man himself was gone and would never, ever come back.
I wasn’t sure I had the strength to keep going, but I kept moving forward anyway.
Now, six years later, my son is the apple of everyone’s eye.
It’s almost funny how a child can smooth over wounds that once seemed permanent. My parents, who used to see me as a storm they had to survive, now light up the moment Leo steps into a room. They treat him like he’s hung the moon and starswith his own two hands, brag about him to their friends, frame every lopsided drawing he brings home, and call him their little miracle.
And Lettie… well, Lettie has become my anchor in ways I never could have imagined.
The sister I once barely spoke to is now the first person I call when I’m at my breaking point, when the weight of everything I keep buried threatens to crush me. She was there in the hospital room the night I delivered Leo, holding my hand when I screamed, wiping the sweat from my forehead when I thought I couldn’t do it anymore. She’s been there for every cold, every birthday, every quiet night when my hands shook too badly to hold a bottle and she pressed it to Leo’s lips for me.
She’s also the only one who knows the full truth about Russia. About Maksim. About how I ran, not because Moscow was too cold or too lonely, but because the man I loved was aPakhan, and the world he lived in almost devoured me whole.
Lettie knows about the interrogation room, about Anton’s men, about the nights I still wake up drenched in sweat from dreams that feel too much like memories.
No one besides her knows who my son’s father is—or was. No one else knows that every time I look into Leo’s gray eyes, I see Maksim staring back at me, a ghost I can’t shake.
And no one else knows how much it still eats me alive that I never got closure. Instead, I live in this endless purgatory, half convinced he’s still out there somewhere, half terrified that if he is, he’ll come crashing back into our lives one day.
But none of that matters anymore.
So I smile when my mother kisses Leo’s cheek, and I laugh when my stepfather pretends to let him win at checkers, and I lean on Lettie when the nights get too heavy. Because the truth, the real and unvarnished truth, lives only between the two of us.
I’ve been in a weird headspace more than usual lately.
Maybe it’s because my son is getting older, his personality blooming more each day in ways that astonish me. He’s clever, quick, stubborn, endlessly curious. And every time he smiles a certain way or tilts his head while thinking, I see Maksim.
I see him in the sharp curve of Leo’s jaw, the same faintly mischievous spark in his eyes when he’s about to bend the rules. I hear him in my son’s laughter. The deep, rolling kind that feels older than six years.
It’s beautiful and it’s painful. A gift and a wound, rolling into one.
We’re at the park now, Lettie and I, watching Leo scramble over the jungle gym like he’s training for an Olympic climbing event. He’s fearless in the way only children can be, reminding me of Yulia. His arms and legs are pumping as he swings himself higher, his voice ringing out as he calls for me to watch him.
