Chapter 63 Kir
KIR
“We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year”
— “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd
I almost didn’t come.
I sat in my car for a long time with the engine running as reporters and camera crews piled onto the courthouse steps, preparing to watch my father sign his own death warrant.
In the end, I got out and walked over for one reason and one reason only: the realization that I’ve spent my entire life watching my father from a distance.
From the crack in a closet door. From across a boardroom table. Always removed by a layer of something invisible and impenetrable.
Fuck it. If this is the end of our relationship, might as well watch it from up close and personal.
Now, I’m leaning against a stone pillar at the far edge of the crowd, sunglasses on, collar up.
Nobody recognizes me back here, or if they do, they’re too focused on the main event to care.
There must be two hundred reporters jammed onto the steps, plus another dozen camera operators and a wall of satellite trucks lining the curb.
Soon, the courthouse doors open.
And Lukas Lazarev emerges.
My father looks thinner and older than the last time I saw him, but no less formidable. His clothes are neat and clean and his face is somber. The cuffs are gone, which means he posted bail.
He steps up to the cluster of microphones, and the crowd goes dead quiet. He opens his mouth to speak—but just before the words emerge, his eyes find mine. Then, like that was the cue he needed, he begins.
“Eighteen years ago,” he says to the hushed, roiling crowd, “I killed my wife.”
The way it goes from there is like a series of stab wounds. My father speaks in simple, short, clipped sentences, and each one of them rips me apart from the inside out.
He tells the world that his wife, the love of his life, was dying. Cancer is a cruel and vicious animal, and it had Elena Lazareva in its jaws. He tried to save her, he swears he did, but some things can’t be slain, not even by the great and powerful Lukas Lazarev.
So she chose a different way out. On her own terms, not cancer’s. She refused to die by inches in front of her son. In front of me.
Lukas tried to convince her otherwise, but my mother was as stubborn as she was beautiful. In the end, he loved her too much to make her suffer for his sake.
She had one other request, and she wore him down until she extracted his promise: that I never know she chose to leave me.
She couldn’t bear to think that I’d believe she abandoned her son.
I wonder if she knows, wherever she is now, that I’ve spent eighteen years despising the man who helped her go instead.
There it is, then. The full truth revealed, like a body on the autopsy table. My father didn’t kill my mother, and I’ve wasted half my life on hating him for committing the greatest self-sacrifice I’ve ever known.
What does that make me?
All those emotional stab wounds add up, but when I reach a breaking point, it doesn’t go how I imagined.
I expected the floor to open up. Some kind of biblical collapse, the pillars cracking and the ceiling caving in.
I thought all those little details of hating my father—blood on his shirt, dirt under his nails, cold silences, brutal lessons, every last disappointed glance—would detonate and ruin me.
None of that happens.
It all just goes quiet. As if someone found a hidden switch inside me and turned it off. There is only silence where the hate used to live. I don’t know what is supposed to make me tick instead.
My mother chose to die. She loved me enough to leave before she was forcibly taken. And my father… my father loved her enough to let me hate him for it.
What does that make me?
Who am I now?
And worst of all… What the fuck have I done?
I’m not sure where the hours go. I wander around the city, dipping in and out of parks and bars, numb, wasted, wild, lost. I go home and see the blank cleanliness of my apartment. The maid must have come back and finished her job after I interrupted her.
I turn around and walk right back out again.
The sun sets, then rises, then sets again. Just like that, a day has passed. Day 1 of this new chapter of my life. The wandering continues. I look up at some point in the half-dark and see where my feet have taken me.
I’m not fully surprised to find out the answer. I’m at the Astoria site where my mother was buried. It’s nothing more than a vacant lot on an unremarkable corner, fenced off with chain-link fences and orange construction netting.
Beyond the fence, there’s nothing. A gaping hole lined with mud.
This is where they found her.
I duck under the tape and step onto the lot. I walk to the center, near the edge of the dig, and look down at the rectangle of disturbed earth where my mother’s bones lay for eighteen years.
There used to be a record store here. That’s what she told me once, when I was seven or eight and we were looking at old photos.
She pointed to a faded Polaroid of a storefront with a red awning and said, That’s where I met your father.
I tripped while I was dancing and I fell into his arms. Can you believe that?
She chose this spot. She made my father promise to bring her here, to the place where it all started.
I sit down in the dirt. The shame is total. Not for anything I did to Lukas, though. That hatred was built on a lie, and I’ll deal with it eventually, maybe, somehow.
The shame is for Jillian.
How could I have said those things to her?
I told her she disgusted me. I called her a bad mother.
I looked at a woman who survived something unspeakable at nineteen, who carried a child she didn’t choose, who loved that child enough to give her a better life than she could provide, and I called it abandonment.
Now, I understand that my mother left her child to protect him.
Jillian did the same fucking thing.
I press my palms into the cold dirt and do my best to breathe, but this graveyard-scented mud doesn’t do anything to fill my lungs. I feel miserable. This pit is starting to look like a good place to throw myself and stay forever.
How can I fix this? That’s all I can think about, and I have nothing close to a good answer.
I have to fix it. I know that much. There’s no version of my life going forward that doesn’t include trying.
I don’t care if it takes weeks or months or years, or if she slams every door and window in my face.
I don’t care if she moves to another city, another country, another fucking continent.
I will find her, I will get on my knees, and I will tell her that I was wrong.
I was cruel, small, and scared, and I lashed out at the one person who didn’t deserve it because she was the closest thing within reach.
She trusted me with the worst parts of herself. I used them to hurt her. That’s exactly the man I swore I’d never become.
I have to be better.
I have to earn her back.
How, though?
How?
How?!
Footsteps ring out from behind me. I know who they belong to.
“For eighteen fucking years, you let me believe you were a killer,” I say without looking up from the empty pit.
My father stops a few feet behind me. I hear him exhale through his nose. “Yes.”
Silence. Whipping wind. Car engines. Pigeon coos.
“I’ve hated you for so long,” I whisper, still not tearing my eyes away from the blackness at the bottom. “It’s the only thing that made sense. And now, you’re telling me it was all… nothing.”
“No, not nothing.” He sits next to me. “Your mother is gone, son. She’s been gone for eighteen years. But I’m still here. And whether you want me or not, whether you hate me or not, I am your father. I’m not going anywhere.”
I let those words sit for a while. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not surprised. Lukas is like a mountain. An immovable object and an irresistible force all in one.
But I’ve always been different than him. He’s cold stone; I’m hot fire. So if a mountain stays… what does an inferno do?
I’m afraid I know the answer already.
I’m not going anywhere. Is that what Jillian needs from me? For me to show up and refuse to leave, the way my father just did? Do I plant myself in front of her and say I’m here, deal with it, I’m not moving?
Or is that exactly the wrong thing? Maybe loving Jillian doesn’t look like showing up. It could look like stepping back, away, out. Gone forever. Giving her room to breathe without my shadow falling across every doorway she walks through.
She spent five years rebuilding herself after a man ripped her choices away. And then I snuck through her window and started taking them again. I decided when I came and went. I chose. Not her. Me.
What if fires are only born so they can return to ash?
What if the bravest thing I can do for Jillian is let her go?