Epilogue
Caiden
The plane smells like recycled air, and I’m strapped in by the window, my shoulder pressed against cold plastic, watching the runway slide past as the engines whine louder.
The cabin is full of voices, all tired and hungover, joking too loudly because silence would mean thinking, but it all feels distant, like I’m underwater.
I shouldn’t be surprised that I feel like this. I knew leaving would hurt. I just didn’t expect it to feel like something had been taken rather than left behind.
The wheels lift, the ground drops away, and Russia shrinks into something abstract and unreachable — it’s just another place I’m not in anymore.
I close my eyes briefly, breathe, then slowly reach into my bag.
The book is right where I put it. A worn paperback, the corners bent and softened from use. Ari’s book. Not a gift-shop copy, not something replaceable, his. The idea of that still does something unpleasant and warm to my chest.
I wait till the seatbelt light goes off, and the noise settles into a steady hum, and the men around me are distracted enough not to notice me staring at poetry as if it might explode.
Then I open it. Page seventy. His favourite.
It’s a poem by Aleksandr Blok.
I read it once without really taking it in. Then again, slower. Then a third time, because the words feel like they’re aimed directly at me; it’s quietly devastating in that very Ari way.
It’s about absence. About leaving, and the space people leave behind when they go, and how sometimes that space feels heavier than the person ever did.
My throat tightens as I choke back the burn from the tears trying to escape.
That’s when I see it.
Not printed.
Not part of the book.
It’s handwritten. Small. Neat. Tucked into the margin like it almost doesn’t want to be seen.
I stare at it, and my breath leaves my lungs in something that’s half a laugh, and half a sound I don’t quite recognise. I press my lips together hard, shaking my head.
Of course.
Of course he wouldn’t just say goodbye like a normal person.
Of course he’d leave me a way back.
I lean my head against the seat, eyes closed now, book resting against my chest. My chest aches, but it’s not hollow anymore.
A grin tugs at my mouth. “Sneaky Russian bastard,” I whisper under my breath. I’m tired, wrecked and entirely gone.
The plane carries on toward the sky. And for the first time since leaving the ground —
I don’t feel like this is the end.