"So whatever made those two old people dead," I said. "That is partly on me."
Alek did not answer right away. He sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. He looked at the folder. He looked at me.
"I will not say it is not," he said. "But it was not your choice. If you had remembered who you were, you would have died standing in front of them. That is who you are." A beat. "It is notwho they were. We are bratva. They were not. You did not make that. You only walked into their kitchen."
I put my face into both my hands for the count of one breath. The dark behind my palms was a kind of relief. I brought my hands back down.
"I know this is a lot, brother," Mikhail said. "If you want to seek justice for them, you have the family behind you."
"I want to."
"Rest first," Ivan said. "We start tomorrow."
Tomorrow was a word that meant a thing in this house. I could hear it in the way he said it. It was not a soft word and it was not a hard word. It was a marker on a calendar that other men were going to keep.
Mikhail's tone changed. He stood from the chair he had been on. He brushed the front of his shirt down with the flat of his hand the way a man does when he is changing the subject on purpose.
"There is one more thing," he said. "The little girl. You are going to be on the floor of this thing inside a week. You will not have hours for her. I know a nanny who is very good. The best. I will see if she can come up for a few days while you are working."
He did not look at his brothers when he said it. He looked at a corner of the wall above my head.
His mouth lifted at one corner. A small thing. He did not let it become a smile. He let it sit at the corner of his mouth for the length of half a breath and then he put it away again.
"Thank you," I said. "Anything that keeps her steady. I take it."
Mikhail nodded. He did not say a name.
I walked out of the meeting room. The hall was quieter than I expected it to be. The light at the far end was warm and yellow and coming from a doorway I had not been through yet.
I followed it.
Rhea was on a tall stool at the kitchen island. The three women were around her at three points of a triangle, not crowding her, leaving her space. There was a bowl of soup in front of her she had not touched yet, but she was talking to it as if she might. Her braids were still crooked. The bear sat on the counter at her elbow with its arms out.
Lily was at the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and her head turned at an angle that said she was listening to the small voice at the island more than she was watching the pot. Jade was leaning on the island with both elbows and her braid down her back. Sienna had taken the stool next to Rhea and was peeling the paper off a piece of bread.
I stopped at the doorway.
I looked at my sister surrounded by three women who had put their arms around me on the steps because their bodies had remembered me before I did.
The name Daniil sat a little differently on me than it had at the grave. I could not say how. It was not a memory. It was not a face coming back. It was a name that had been in a drawer for three months, and someone had taken it out, and now it was on the table in front of me with my driver's license and my passport and my own hands in a photograph.
I did not put the name on. I did not take it off either.
Rhea looked up and saw me in the doorway. She lifted the bear at me by one arm in a small wave. I lifted my hand back.
She is safe in this room tonight. That is the thing I have.
13
CHLOE
The boys were down. Theo on his stomach with one arm flung over the edge of the mattress in the way that always made me want to slide it back under the blanket. Owen at the sink in the hall bathroom counting to thirty with the brush like a metronome. I'd left a glass of water on his nightstand. I'd checked the lock on the back door twice. I'd put the dishwasher on the short cycle.
I pulled the front door closed on its slow hinge and came down the four stone steps with my bag on my shoulder. The cold had teeth tonight. The brownstone block was dark the way it goes dark in the fall here, the sky a low purple over the rooflines, a yellow square of window two doors down where someone was up late with a baby or a deadline. I had walked down these steps every night since the second week of the search. The exhaustion in my body wasn't the kind that fixed with sleep. It was a tiredness that had moved into my bones and gotten a key cut.
That was when I saw her.
A dark sedan was at the curb with its parking lights on. A woman in a long camel coat was leaning back against the front fender with her ankles crossed and her collar turned up aroundher jaw. Her hands were in her pockets. Her face when she saw me did the small fast thing it does when she has been holding still for a long time and the held thing inside her gets to move.
