Chapter Twenty-Three
Lauren
Claire has the day off.
I told myself it shouldn’t matter—she’s been wonderful with Hannah, patient and warm and exactly what these strange, suspended days have needed. But I wake up and feel the difference immediately. Something in my shoulders that I didn’t know was braced lets go.
I portion out Hannah’s breakfast, start on Nikolai’s and mine, and the kitchen feels like it belongs to us again.
Nikolai is in the office most of the morning.
I can hear him moving around up there—chair, footsteps, the low register of his voice when he makes calls.
Working the problem, the way he always is.
I make bad use of the time by sitting in front of the television with a cup of coffee that goes cold while Hannah builds something complicated and architectural out of couch cushions on the floor beside me.
By lunch, the three of us are at the dining table with ham and cheese sandwiches and the particular quiet of people who have stopped needing to fill silence.
I don’t have much appetite, but I eat anyway—Hannah is watching, the way she always watches, and I won’t let her learn to push food away from me.
“I don’t want the crusts,” Hannah announces, examining her sandwich with suspicion.
“You have to eat the crusts,” I reply.
“They make your hair go curly,” Nikolai says, perfectly straight-faced.
Hannah’s hands fly to her hair. She looks at her sandwich. Then back at her hair. Then she takes a cautious bite of the crust, chewing slowly, as though monitoring herself for symptoms.
I press my lips together and look down at my plate.
This is the thing that terrifies me the most—not the danger outside these walls, not the abstract threat of Aslanov, but this.
The ordinariness of it. The way the three of us can sit around a table with sandwiches and make each other laugh without trying, and how natural it feels, and how much I have started to want it.
I didn’t know something was missing until he came back. Okay, that’s not entirely true. But that’s the part I can’t forgive him for, and can’t stop being grateful for, and can’t untangle from the rest of it.
Nikolai finishes first, excuses himself, and heads back upstairs to make his calls. The table feels different without him. Hannah keeps eating, unaware, narrating something quietly to Mr. Brummy about the structural integrity of her remaining crusts.
I watch her and feel the gap like a physical thing.
“Come on, baby,” I say, when her plate is clear. “Time for your nap.”
Hannah yawns wide enough to unhinge her jaw, then immediately squares her shoulders like she’s prepared to argue about it.
“I don’t need a nap. I’m too old.”
“You’re four, baby. Not fourteen.”
“I can’t wait until I’m fourteen.”
I take her hand and try not to think about that. “Yes,” I say. “Neither can I.”
She allows herself to be led to her room with the dignity of someone making a strategic concession. I tuck her in and she settles fast—pulling Mr. Brummy under her chin, eyes already going soft at the edges—and I almost think she’s down when she starts speaking.
“Mommy.”
“Mm.”
“What was my daddy like?”
The question lands the way it always does. Not sharp exactly—more like pressure on something that never fully healed. I sit with it for a moment before I answer.
“He was big and strong,” I say. “Fierce. Protective.” I smooth the edge of the blanket. “He would have done anything for us.”
Hannah considers this with her eyes half-closed.
“Like Nikolai?”
The air goes out of the room.
I keep my hands still on the blanket and breathe through the ache of it—the particular cruelty of a four-year-old’s intuition, landing exactly where it hurts without knowing it’s aimed at anything.
“Yes, baby,” I say quietly. “Like Nikolai.”
She seems satisfied with that. Her grip on Mr. Brummy loosens slightly, the way it does when she’s going under.
I watch her face settle—the little furrow between her brows smoothing out, her mouth going soft—and I think about what it will mean when she’s old enough to understand.
What she’ll make of these weeks, looking back.
Whether she’ll be grateful or angry, or both.
I can’t give her a father she might have to lose.
That’s the line I keep coming back to, the one thing I’m certain of when everything else feels like shifting ground.
Her lips part.
“I like Nikolai,” she murmurs, mostly asleep now. “He’s funny.” A beat. “I like Claire too.”
I go still.
“Do you, baby?” I keep my voice even. “What do you like about her?”
“She’s nice,” Hannah says, eyes already closing. “She makes me pancakes. But she asks a lot of questions.”
I keep my voice easy. “What kind of questions, sweetheart?”
“Where I go to school.” A pause, drifting. “And yesterday, before you woke up, she asked if I like Nikolai. I said I do.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She said that’s nice.”
Hannah’s breathing begins to slow and deepen. I don’t ask anything else.
I sit with it instead. The school question turns over in my mind—not the kind of thing a tutor asks, not idle curiosity either.
We’re not from Chicago. Hannah’s school is in Atlanta, four states away, and there is no reason on earth for Claire to be asking about it.
The question about Nikolai is something else again—a four-year-old as a source, asked before I was awake.
I don’t like any of this.
I must talk to Nikolai tonight, before Claire comes back tomorrow.
Hannah is fully under now, one arm thrown over Mr. Brummy, cheek pressed into the pillow. I lean in and kiss her temple, then straighten and move toward the door.
At the threshold I stop.
I look at her—small and certain in her bed, the bear tucked against her chest, the bear that Nikolai chose and carried up here himself—and something that’s been shifting in me for days moves the rest of the way.
Every child deserves to know who their father is. I’ve told myself I’m protecting her. From loss, from confusion, from having something given and taken away. But I was also given something true and told it was gone, and I spent four years building a life around a lie. I know what that costs.
Hannah won’t be four forever. The longer this goes on, the harder the truth becomes to give her. And if I wait too long—if she’s older when she finds out, if she pieces it together herself—she won’t remember this time as something tender.
She’ll remember it as the time everyone lied.
I’ve spent years trying not to become my father. Telling myself I was doing better, raising her in honesty, in steadiness, in the light. But a lie is a lie regardless of how gently you hold it.
And this one isn’t mine to keep indefinitely. It belongs to her.
I pull the door to and stand in the quiet hallway for a moment, the decision settling into something that feels less like a choice and more like an inevitability.
I need to talk to Nikolai first.
But tonight, maybe, we tell her the truth.