15 #2
"You're selling something. The boat — whose boat, Yegor?
What's happening?" I came down the last few stairs, my own voice gone unsteady in a way I hadn't planned on.
"Please. I've watched you disappear into yourself for two months now and told myself it was a woman, told myself it was none of my business, and I'm done telling myself that. What's going on."
He was quiet for a long moment, the phone finally lowering to his side, his expression cycling through three or four things before settling on something that looked, more than anything else, like relief — the specific relief of a man who's been carrying something alone for too long and has just been handed permission to set it down, even partially.
"Can we go inside. I don't want to do this on the stairs where anyone could walk by."
I led him into the back office, the same room where Gleb had shown me our father's note weeks earlier, and some small, exhausted part of me registered the dark symmetry of it — another brother, another secret, the same scarred desk bearing witness to all of it.
"I'm trying to leave," he said, finally, once the door was shut behind us, barely above a whisper.
"The life. All of it. I've been trying to put together enough money, quietly, to actually go somewhere and start over without it looking like I'm running, because if it looks like I'm running, someone's going to ask why, and I don't have a good enough answer to that question that doesn't put a target on my back, or worse, on someone else's. "
"Whose boat, Yegor."
"Mine. The one I bought two years ago with money I shouldn't have had, doing things I'm not proud of, for people I'm trying very hard to stop being one of.
" His voice cracked on the last word, the careful performance of the last two months finally giving all the way out.
"I can't do this anymore, Dari. I thought I could.
I thought it would feel like Vadim says it feels — like purpose, like family, like something worth the parts of it that are ugly.
It just feels like drowning. It's felt like drowning for over a year, and I didn't know how to say that out loud to anyone who'd actually understand instead of just being disappointed in me. "
"Why would I be disappointed in you. For wanting out."
"Because Vadim built his whole life around this.
Because Rurik's been good to all of us, better than he had to be, and walking away feels like spitting on that.
Because I keep picturing the conversation where I actually tell someone, and in every version I've pictured, somebody looks at me like I'm weak for not being able to stomach the same thing the rest of you stomach without complaint.
" He wiped roughly at his eyes with the back of his hand.
"I didn't want to be the brother who couldn't handle it.
I've spent two years pretending considerably harder than I should have had to, just to avoid that look on someone's face. "
I pulled him into a hug before he'd finished the sentence, the two of us standing in the same small office where I'd learned, weeks earlier, about a note that might unravel everything I thought I understood about my own family, and felt him shake against me the way he hadn't shaken since we were children sitting on a floor being told that both our parents were never coming home.
"Does Rurik know," I asked, quietly, into his shoulder.
"No. God, no. If he knew I was trying to leave quietly instead of asking properly, he might think I was running from something specific, might think I was a liability, and I can't risk that, not with everything else this family's already survived this year.
" He pulled back, wiping his face with the back of his hand, some of the old brightness trying, valiantly, to reassemble itself.
"Please don't tell him. Please don't tell Vadim either, not yet.
Let me finish this my own way, quietly, the way I've planned it.
I just need until the end of the month."
"What happens once you actually go. Where will you even be."
"I don't fully know yet. Somewhere quiet.
Somewhere nobody's heard the name Antonov attached to anything specific.
" He managed something close to a smile, fragile but real.
"I used to think I wanted excitement, you know.
When I was younger, watching Vadim come home looking like he mattered to something enormous.
I think I just wanted to matter to something.
I don't think I ever actually wanted this particular something, not really, not the way he does. "
I thought, standing in that small office, about every secret I was already keeping — Rurik's name unspoken to my brothers, a note locked in a drawer with two unnamed initials circling inside it, and now this, my own brother's quiet, frightened escape from a world I loved a dangerous man inside of.
I thought about how impossible it had become to tell where loyalty ended and complicity began, when every promise I made to protect someone I loved required betraying, in some smaller way, someone else I loved just as much.
"I won't tell them," I said, because I couldn't see another version of that sentence that didn't end with Yegor more frightened than he already was.
"But Yegor — if anything goes wrong, if anyone so much as looks at you sideways before this is finished, you come to me immediately. Not after. Immediately."
"I promise." He hugged me again, fierce and brief, and managed, on his way out, something closer to his old grin.
"For what it's worth, Dari — whatever you're carrying that's making your hands shake the way they were shaking just now, before you even saw my phone.
I see it too. I haven't asked, because God knows I haven't earned the right to ask anyone else's secrets right now. But I see it."
He disappeared back up the stairs before either of us had to find anything else to say about that, and I stood alone in the office for a long time afterward, the building settling into its evening quiet around me, and understood that I had just added a fourth weight to the catalogue, the heaviest one yet, and that I had no idea anymore which direction I was supposed to set any of it down in first, or whether setting any of it down was even still an option I had left available to me, or whether I had simply become, somewhere along the way, the kind of woman who carries things instead of setting them down at all.