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“Sit,” she says.

I sit.

I tell her everything. The Mercedes. Our father on my stairs. One fifth of Yaroslav’s empire. Rusakov. Sunday at seven, and bring the girl.

Kira doesn’t move while I talk. She stands at the counter stirring slowly while she takes it all in, and her face goes paler and paler until I’m worried about her.

When I’ve finished, the kitchen is silent except for Pasha babbling against Anton’s shoulder.

“I’m coming,” she says. She puts the spoon down. “He doesn’t get to sit you at his table on your own. Not again. Not ever.” She looks at Anton. “We’re coming. It will give us a chance to meet Evaria properly anyway. And I’m sure our mother would love to see her grandbabies.”

Anton doesn’t say anything. He just nods once, the way he nodded at Saoirse’s table when I said I wanted Evaria to see the worst first.

A wild grin spreads over Kira’s face. “And I want to see his reaction when a Maximova walks in on your arm and doesn’t flinch.”

I look at my hands on her kitchen table.

“What?” Kira asks sharply. She knows me. She’s always known me, even when I wasn’t there.

“I heard her say something this morning,” I say. “To her sister.”

I tell her. It’s not like I have a choice.

My sister looks at me for a long time. Then she sits down across from me, slowly, one hand on the curve of her belly.

“I didn’t have a choice either,” she says. “I know you weren’t there, but Papa sat me down in his office and told me my life wasn’t my own anymore. I walked down the aisle to a man I’d never met.” She glances at Anton, who has gone very quiet by the window with our nephew asleep on his chest. “I didn’t choose the wedding, Theo. But I did chose him. Later. And every day after.”

“That’s not the same.”

“No,” Kira says. “It’s not. Because nobody asked me. You’ve got a chance I never had.” She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. “So ask her.”

“Ask her what?”

“What she wants.” She squeezes my hand. “You’re so afraid she’s another person who was never given a choice. Did it occur to you to give her one?”

I don’t have an answer for that.

Mila comes skidding into the kitchen in her tutu and her helmet and demands her horse ride. I give it to her. I gallop the length of my sister’s hallway three times with a three-year-old screaming with joy on my shoulders, and the whole time, I’m thinking about pink walls and a pressed daisy and a voice behind an office door.

It’s not like I have a choice.

Tonight, I’m going to ask her.

And whatever she answers, I’ll have to live with it.

EVARIA

He doesn’t text me all day.

I check my phone at lunch, between reading groups, while a boy called Marcus tells me in great detail why sharks are better than dinosaurs. Nothing. I check it in the car park and again at the lights on Ashland. Still nothing.

He left this morning without saying goodbye.

I keep telling myself it doesn’t mean anything. That he had somewhere to be. That a man who can put another man on the canvas in ten seconds doesn’t need to explain himself every time he walks out of a house.

But he looked at me over the toast this morning like I was the only thing in the room. And then he was gone.

By the time I pull into Papa’s drive, I’ve invented eleven different reasons, and I hate every one of them.