But the familiar man standing there isn’t Aleksandr.
“Lili,” Michael greets her. Wearing a gray suit, his cold expression is almost unreadable. “So, you are alive.”
“Look, I’ll sign whatever you need,” she says, walking past him as fast as she can. She cannot do this; she refuses to do this. “An NDA, whatever—just, I don’t know, email it to me, I can’t—”
“That’s not why I’m here,” he says, following her.
Suddenly panicked, Lili looks back at the car. “Wait, is he—is he here—”
“It’s just me,” he reassures her. His tone is calm, the way you’d speak to soothe a child or a scared animal. Lili hates that; she doesn’t deserve that. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Then why—”
“I’d like to speak with you. Please.”
“Why?” she repeats, walking faster down River Street towards Domino Park. Michael keeps up easily as the bright blue gantry cranes come into sight. Leave, he needs toleave—she can’t face this. “Your stock price is doing fine, I’m not sure why you’re so concerned.”
“I don’t care about the fucking stock price, I care about him,” he snaps. “He’s going crazy, all he’s doing is worrying about you. I think he’s a few hours away from just camping outside your house, but he doesn’t want to suffocate you. All he does is work—hasn’t stopped working except to call you.”
“Shouldn’t you be happy that I’m not your problem anymore? That it’s over?”
Suddenly, Michael steps in front of her, blocking her way. “Doesheknow it’s over?” His gaze is sharp, like he’s caught a new detail.
“What?” she breathes. “Are you kidding me?”
“Lili, he’s out in the fuckingcold. He has no idea what’s happened—doesn’t know if something happened with your family, if you’re shutting him out because you want to deal with it on your own, or something with school, or anything.” His tone is insistent. She’s never seen Michael this close to unpolished. “He’s grasping at bloodyair—”
Lili shakes her head. “Look—I don’t know what he thinks,” she whispers. “But it’s not—it’s not his fault, there isn’t anything he did, I can’t talk about it, just—please, leave me alone. He doesn’t...” Shutting her eyes for a moment, she exhales heavy air before looking at the ground. “He doesn’t need me in his life, I don’t need him in my mine. It’s not a fit—you’ve said as much yourself.”
Michael sighs. “Lili, please.” He gestures at the park benches. “Can we sit?”
She bites her lip, hard. Staring at the ground, the paving stones blur, breathing inching up into a panic—his shoes gleam black against the pavement, compared to the scuffed brown leather of her worn-in Blundstones—she should just run; she should run, and block his number, and cut this entire summer out of her life—anything, fuckinganything, to avoid swallowing this guilt and shame, realizing the magnitude of what she’s done—
“Lili,” Michael repeats. She looks at him. His gaze is steady, careful, focused. Concern for his friend, she supposes, but also—surprisingly—for her. It makes her want to cry. Again and again, faced with things she does not deserve. She needs to end this: the extent of the weight she exerts on the world.
Lili nods, once. Taking a seat on the nearby bench, she curls her knees into her chest, setting her phone beside her. As Michael sits down, she stares straight ahead at the East River. She hears the happy shriek of children from the playground, the rush of waves against the shorefront. Across the water, a glorious view of the city stretches from the white stone of the UN and Midtown skyscrapers down to the Williamsburg Bridge. Ferries pass, churning white water.
“Did he tell you how we got out?” Michael asks.
“Got out?”
“After the fall. How we left Leningrad, got to England.”
A memory of morning light, bruises on her neck that he’d traced, regret and a father’s ring.Was it worse, afterwards? A different kind of worse.
“For school,” she replies. It hurts, repeating what he’d given her. “He said he left in ’93. That when there was a chance to get out, he took it.”
Michael huffs a hard laugh. “A chance,” he repeats. “He got out—gotusout—tooth and nail. We had no money, no real connections. That boy—this man—saved his life, and mine.”
“What do you mean?” she whispers, because she can’t help herself.
He sighs, staring at the water: the chop of ferries, sunshine over the city.
“He’s a few years older than me,” he says. “He left for Oxford first. I came a couple years later—exhausted, stunned. It was the first time I’d ever left Russia, and it felt absurd and improbable, near Technicolor, to suddenly be in the West—cars on the wrong side of the road, a late British summer, willows on the Cherwell. Foreign, everything felt so completely foreign.
“We spoke Russian, when he picked me up at the airport. But when I came down the stairs the next morning, to him and his roommates in their kitchen?PerfectEnglish. Not just the language—he’d always had very good English, but now, no Russian accent. Like he’d been raised here, all British, bleached away some dark stain of history from himself. I was stunned. I spoke good English—I got into Oxford, obviously—but not like him.
“‘You need to get rid of your accent,’ he told me later. ‘Remember your Russian, but in English, no accent. Understand?’ He had me anglicize my name, too. Michael, instead of Mikhail.
