He watches before he speaks. He remembers everything. He never forgets where people put their keys, their cigarettes, their tempers. When one of the housemaids cried in the kitchen last week because her husband had been taken in for gambling debts, Nikolai found her later and gave her his favorite toy car because, as he explained to me that night, she looked like she had forgotten something kind existed.
Papa saw that. He sees everything he can use.
By the time breakfast ends, I’m holding myself together with the kind of brittle patience women in my family learn young.
Sofia is taken upstairs with her nanny to wash jam from her hands. Nikolai is about to follow when Papa rests that same hand on his shoulder again.
“Five minutes,” he says. “Then lessons.”
Nikolai glances at me.
The look is small. Easy to miss.
But I see the question in it.
I smile because he needs that from me more than honesty. “Five minutes.”
He goes with Papa.
Mama watches them leave and says nothing until the room is mostly empty.
Then, quietly, “You should not let him see your fear.”
I stare at the untouched coffee in front of me. “I’m not afraid.”
Mama gives me the look mothers reserve for lies too transparent to challenge directly.
I exhale. “I’m afraid of the wrong things.”
She reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers. “No. You’re afraid of the right thing. That’s why you’re still a good mother in this house.”
That almost undoes me.
Because this house is not built for good mothers.
It’s built for obedient daughters, decorative wives, strategic sons.
I stand too quickly and tell myself I only need to check on Sofia. Instead, I walk to the study.
The door is slightly open.
Papa stands by the window with his coffee. Nikolai is in the leather chair across from the desk, his feet nowhere near the floor, the silver wolf paperweight in his hands.
“A man does not answer too quickly,” Papa is saying. “If he answers too quickly, he gives other people what they want.”
Nikolai frowns. “How long should he wait?”
Papa smiles. “Long enough to make them uncomfortable.”
I push the door fully open.
The room shifts.
Papa turns to me, unsurprised.
“Papa,” I say. “He’s just a kid, we should put him in preschool. Sofia, too.”
“Nonsense,” he says. “School is too dangerous for someone like us. He has his tutors, and besides, even you never went to school.”