I rub the back of my neck, fingers catching briefly in my collar. There’s no use lying. We both already know the answer to that question. I feel like a house still standing after a fire, every timber scorched beneath the surface, structurally still there, but the insides hollowed out.
“I’m functioning,” I say eventually, which is not the same as fine, but it’s all I have for now.
Katya nods once.
“We’ll see what happens,” I mutter, mostly to myself.
What happens next, I don't know. All I know is that while this war with Mikhail may have ended, that doesn’t mean the problems have instantly vanished.
They may have just shifted into something else.
20
IVY
My parents don’t leave me alone for the next few days, and neither does Lettie.
They hover, circle, pick at the fraying threads of my silence with questions I can’t answer and worried eyes that only seem to grow more haunted the longer I fail to give them what they’re so desperately seeking, wearing me down with every conversation I can’t finish.
At first, they try to be gentle about it.
“Sweetheart, we just want to understand…”
“We need to know what happened, Ivy.”
“Was it him? Was it Maksim? Or someone else?”
Their voices change depending on the moment, sometimes trembling with concern, sometimes laced with barely concealed fury, and sometimes just… pleading. But they’re always there, always echoing in my head even when the house falls quiet.
For days, it’s the same.
I want to open my mouth and tell them everything—about the mental torture, about the blackmail, about Leo’s tiny cries in the night when his nightmares take him back to the horrible place. About the way Mikhail’s voice still slithers into my dreams and the terror of seeing him press that gun to my son’s head and being completely powerless to stop it.
I want to so badly tell them everything… but nothing ever comes out.
It’s like there’s a wall inside me, thick and invisible and immovable, pressing down on my chest every time I try. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth, my throat burns, my hands tremble. I don’t even know how to begin separating the pain from the truth. I don’t know how to untangle one horror from the next without shattering into pieces in front of them.
So, I stay silent.
I can’t afford to break.
Not when Leo still wakes up in the middle of the night calling for me, when he curls against my chest like he’s afraid I’ll disappear again if he’s not holding onto me, when I’m the only thing keeping him grounded to this reality after everything he’s seen.
To my surprise, Maksim comes to visit us every day.
I never expected it after shutting him out, but sure enough, every afternoon like clockwork, the familiar black car pulls up to the curb in front of my parents’ house, and every afternoon, the chaos begins.
The first time, my father slams the door in his face before he can get a single word out. No hesitation, no warning. Just an explosivecrackof wood against wood and a fury I haven’t seen in my father in years.
The second time, it’s my mother who intercepts him on the porch, her arms crossed and her mouth drawn tight with rage. She doesn’t yell at him. No, that would be too easy. Her words are laced with venom, soft and sharp enough to bleed him dry without ever raising her voice. She tells him tostay away from my daughter,andyou’ve done enough.
The third time, it’s Lettie.
And Lettie yells.
She screams so loudly at him that the neighbors poke their heads out from behind curtains and open windows, curious about the scene unraveling on our usually quiet street. She doesn’t hold back, either. She calls him every name in the book, tells him he’s a coward, a manipulator, acriminal. That he has no business being anywhere near Leo or me. That if he thinks he can just show up and be forgiven, he’s more deluded than she thought.
Every day, he leaves. Not with any theatrics but with his jaw locked tight, a muscle ticking in his cheek that’s visible from even the second floor. He doesn’t shout back or defend himself. He just turns and walks back down the steps, back toward the car waiting for him.