Chapter 16 Anna
ANNA
I can’t sleep.
The entire night, I lie on top of the covers staring at the ceiling, turning over every version of the same conversation in my head.
How do you tell four-year-olds that you lied to them?
Not accidentally. Not once. Hundreds of times, in hundreds of small ways, every time they asked about their father and you told them he was gone, he was in heaven, he loved them, but he couldn’t be here.
Every version ends the same way.
By morning, I still don’t have the words.
I avoid Luca completely. Stay in my room until I hear his car leave for the office. Only then do I go to the twins’ rooms and push open their doors.
They’re already awake. Alexei is building something with blocks on his bedroom floor, focused and quiet. Mila is in her room arranging her stuffed animals in a row along the windowsill, assigning them seats with the authority of someone running a very small theater.
“Breakfast?” I ask.
“Can we have the thick pancakes?” Mila asks.
“Not today. Come on.”
We eat in the small dining room. The twins chatter about their plans for the morning. Mila wants to go to the garden. Alexei wants to work on his train track. I nod at the right moments, push food around my plate, and think about what comes after breakfast.
“You’re not eating,” Alexei says.
“I’m fine.”
He looks at me the way he does when he doesn’t believe me but has decided not to push. Then he goes back to his food.
After breakfast, I take them to the playroom. Let them settle into their things. Mila goes straight to her dollhouse. Alexei pulls out his train set and starts connecting pieces with the focused efficiency of someone who has a plan and intends to execute it.
I sit on the floor with them and watch them play and wait for Luca.
He appears in the doorway at ten o’clock exactly. “Can I join you?” he asks.
Neither of the twins answers immediately. They look at me.
“It’s okay,” I tell them.
Luca walks in and sits down on the floor across from them. Cross-legged, at their level. It’s such a deliberate thing, a man like him folding himself onto a playroom floor, that both twins stop what they’re doing and look at him properly.
He’s nervous. I can see it in the set of his shoulders. The careful way he’s holding himself still.
“I want to tell you something,” he says. “Something important.”
Mila sets her doll down. Alexei puts his hands in his lap.
“You know how your mama told you I was your stepfather when you first moved here?”
They nod.
“That’s not right.” He pauses and looks at them both. “I’m your father. Your real father.”
The room goes completely quiet.
Mila stares at him. “But our daddy died. Mama said he went to heaven.”
“I know that’s what you were told. But I didn’t die. I’ve been here the whole time.”
Alexei looks at Luca. Then at me. Then back at Luca. His face cycles through something too fast and too complicated for a four-year-old to sort.
“You’re our real daddy?” he asks Luca. Not me. Luca.
“Yes.”
Alexei looks down at the train car in his hand. Back up at Luca.
Then the biggest smile I have ever seen on my son’s face breaks across it like it’s been waiting a long time to get out. “I KNEW it,” he says.
Luca blinks. “You knew?”
“I didn’t know. But.” He waves the train car between himself and Luca like it explains everything. “We’re the same. You and me. We like the same things, and we think the same, and Mila said I even look like you.” He’s almost bouncing now. “So I knew. Kind of. I just didn’t know I knew.”
Mila hasn’t moved. She’s working through something slower and deeper than her brother’s immediate joy. I can see it happening in her face.
“But Mama said our daddy was dead,” she says quietly.
“I know, baby,” I manage.
“She said he went to heaven.”
“I made a mistake. A big one. I’m so sorry.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then back at Luca.
“You’re him?” she asks him. “You’re our daddy?”
“Yes. I’m him.”
Her chin wobbles. “You were here the whole time,” she says.
“Yes.”
Something breaks open in her face and she launches herself at him with the full force of a small person who has decided, and Luca catches her and she wraps her arms around his neck and starts crying into his shoulder.
Not sad crying, the other kind, the kind that comes from relief so big a four-year-old body doesn’t know what else to do with it.
Alexei sets his train car down carefully and climbs into the space beside his sister. He doesn’t cry. He just leans against his father’s arm with that smile still on his face, quieter now, like something has finally settled into place inside him that needed settling.
Luca holds both of them. He looks up at me over their heads, and I look back at him, and for a moment, the only thing in the world is the three of them on the playroom floor.
“You’re not going to go to heaven now, are you?” Mila asks against his shoulder.
“No.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
She tightens her arms around his neck. Alexei reaches up and pats his father’s arm twice with one small hand, matter-of-fact, confirming something.
Then Alexei pulls back slightly and looks at me. The smile is still there, but something else has come into his face alongside it. Something quieter. His eyes are steady on mine, and I know what’s coming before he opens his mouth.
“Mama,” he says. “Why did you say he was dead?”
The question lands softly. No accusation in it yet. Just a four-year-old asking his mother a simple question and waiting for a simple answer.
“Because I made a mistake,” I say. “A very bad one.”
“But you said it lots of times.”
“I know.”
He thinks about this. “Did you know he wasn’t dead?”
I can’t lie to him. Not now. Not after all of it. “Yes, baby. I knew.”
His face does something small and painful. “So you told us something that wasn’t true. On purpose.”
“Yes.”
Mila has lifted her head from Luca’s shoulder. She’s looking at me now too. Both of them are looking at me with the same expression, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to hold.
“Why?” Mila asks. Her voice is very small. “Why would you say our daddy was dead if he wasn’t?”
“Because I was scared. I was trying to protect you.”
“From Daddy?”
“I thought so. At the time.”
Mila looks at Luca. Then back at me. “But he’s nice to us.”
“I know he is.”
“So why were you scared of him?”
I don’t have an answer that fits inside words a four-year-old can hold. I don’t have an answer that doesn’t make me sound like a woman who made choices she can’t fully justify to the people most affected by them.
“I was wrong to be scared,” I say finally. “And I was wrong to lie. Both of those things are true.”
Mila slides off Luca’s lap. She walks to me slowly, stands in front of me, and looks at my face for a long moment with those blue eyes that are my eyes.
Then she climbs into my lap and puts her arms around my neck and holds on.
I hold her back. Press my face into her hair. “I’m sorry, baby,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
She doesn’t say it’s okay. She’s four, not foolish. She just holds on.
Alexei hasn’t moved from beside Luca. He’s looking at the train car in his hand, turning it over, thinking. “Is everything true now?” he asks. “Are you going to tell us true things from now on?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “Everything true from now on.”
He turns the train car over one more time. Then he sets it on the track in front of him, pushes it forward, and watches it go. “Okay,” he says.
Just that. Okay. The particular forgiveness of a child who has decided to move forward because moving forward is better than staying in the hurt. The kind of forgiveness that costs them something, even at four years old, and that I will spend a long time trying to be worthy of.
Luca catches my eye across the room.
He doesn’t say anything. Neither do I.