Katerina lifts her face just enough to look at me. Her eyes are swollen, terrified, relieved, disbelieving all at once.
“He saved them,” she whispers.
I know who she means.
My father.
The man I have wanted dead for so long that the shape of my hatred became part of me.
I look past her, toward the open yard, toward the place he disappeared into the morning, and say nothing.
Because I do not know yet what to do with that.
All I know is this: he was here, they are alive, and when the world finally split open, he chose them.
The sirens get closer.
I keep my arms around Katerina and the children and don’t let go.
EPILOGUE
KATERINA
The house is finally quiet.
That still feels new enough to notice every time it happens. Sofia has stopped asking for one more story, one more song, one more drink of water. Nikolai has stopped pretending He isn’t tired enough to fall asleep sitting up. Their doors are shut. The hallway lights are low. Somewhere outside, the night insects are loud in the garden.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter slicing peaches badly while Roman pours wine like this is a perfectly normal life and not something we stole out of the wreckage of everything that came before it.
He glances at the cutting board and says, “That’s murder, not slicing.”
I look down at the uneven pieces. “You should be grateful I’m not doing this with one of your expensive knives.”
“They’re all expensive.”
“That sounds like a design flaw.”
It’s been six months since we left the old life behind. When the dust settled, when the children were safe and the city in the States had begun to feel too close to too many ghosts, Roman looked at me one quiet morning and said, “Come with me.”
Not as an order. Not even as a plea.
Just as if he had already understood that there was no version of his life left that did not have us in it.
So, we came here.
To a house outside Moscow where the mornings smell like pine and damp earth, where Sofia insists the garden is large enough for a pony and Nikolai has already mapped every room twice and decided he approves of the library but not the wallpaper in the upstairs hall.
Mikhail survived.
The bullet missed what mattered by an inch and left him with a scar and a worse temper, which is saying something. He pretends he disapproves of all domestic happiness on principle, but he comes to dinner more often than he means to and has already let Sofia braid ribbons into his sleeve twice, which means he’s finished as a serious man and simply hasn’t accepted it yet.
My father accepted our marriage the way he accepts storms and taxes and funerals: with resentment, silence, and the understanding that refusal would change nothing. He sent one letter. Short. Formal. Bitter between the lines. Mama wrote separately, much longer, much softer. I cried over hers and burned his.
Andrei Morozov vanished.
One day he was still a force people spoke of in lowered voices. The next, the man himself had disappeared never to be seen again. Roman is convinced that his father will never come knocking our doors again.
“He had the chance to kill me, but he didn’t,” he says. “He and I were both going down the same path, the path of revenge. And the irony is that if he hadn’t overpowered me at first, I would have killed him. And I don’t think he would have cared.”