Chapter 37 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I can feel the soil falling over my head”
— “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths
I take out my voice recorder from my purse, turn it on, and set it next to Kir’s whiskey glass. Kir looks at it, then looks at me, then reaches over and clicks it off.
“No,” he says simply.
“Kir—”
“Everything I say tonight is on background. No names and no faces, remember? Those are my terms.”
I wrap both hands around my glass. “Background is better than nothing, but only barely. I can’t build a solid story on—”
He cuts me off. “You can use what I tell you to know where to look and what to look for, and then you find your own proof through channels that don’t trace back to me.” He nudges the recorder toward my side of the table. “That’s how this works, or it doesn’t work at all.”
Every instinct I have as a reporter is screaming at me to stand my ground here. If I can just get him to stand by what he tells me, this will blow the doors off readers across the country.
But I also know that if I press too hard, he’ll climb back out that window and vanish like the ghost he is, and I’ll be sitting here alone, drinking for two.
“Fine,” I concede at last. “Background. But it better be very fucking good background.”
He nods once. Then he picks up his glass, takes a long drink, and sets it down. “When I was twelve,” he begins, “I saw my father kill my mother.”
My jaw drops.
Kir’s face remains steady. On the surface, at least. But there’s something underneath all that steadiness that I recognize, because I’ve spent five years building the exact same scaffolding around a very similar kind of wound. You hold yourself very still so nobody can see what’s moving inside you.
I slide my hand across the table and put it on top of his.
He looks down at my fingers covering his knuckles. He doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t squeeze back, either. He just lets it happen, and I get the feeling that nobody has done this for him in a very long time. Maybe ever.
“You don’t have to tell me all of this tonight,” I hurry to say. My old J-school professors are all kicking me mentally, aghast at my betrayal of our profession. How could you?! they’re bellowing. Demand he tells you every last detail!!
But I don’t.
Because I’m not sitting across from Kir Lazarev as a reporter right now.
I’m sitting across from him as someone who cares.
“Yes, actually, I do.” He turns his hand over under mine so our palms are pressed together. “Because if I don’t do it now, I’ll talk myself out of it by morning.”
I swallow and nod. “Okay. Then I’m listening.”
Kir takes another drink and starts talking.
“Her name was Elena,” he continues. “Elena Sergeeva Lazareva. When I was eleven, she got sick. My parents didn’t tell me much; I guess they didn’t want me to worry.
So even now, I don’t know how sick she actually was.
But her and my father took a lot of trips, were gone a lot, that sort of thing.
I figured it was all related.” He looks down into the depths of his drink.
“A year or so after the diagnosis, I was supposed to be spending the night at a friend’s house, but it got canceled, so I came home early.
I was going to surprise my mom. To prank her, or whatever.
But when I snuck in, I saw my dad in the kitchen. ”
Something about the way he says that makes me frown. “Doing what?”
“Crushing pills. He ground them up and stirred them into a cup of applesauce.” Kir pauses, then raises his eyes to me. “That was the only thing she could keep down by then.”
A slow, thudding dread starts to creep through me. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. I just knew it didn’t feel right. So I sat in the closet and watched through the crack in the doors. He carried the applesauce down the hall to her room. Then I heard them talking, but I couldn’t make out the words. Then it got quiet.”
“For how long?”
“Hours, I think. I don’t know. It felt like hours. Then I heard footsteps. and when I looked out… He walked right past the closet carrying her. Her head was hanging back and her eyes were closed and her mouth was a little bit open and she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t moving at all.”
“Kir…”
He starts to rub the tip of his finger around the rim of his glass, again and again. “He took her out the front door. I stayed in the closet. I told myself he was taking her to the hospital, the pills were medicine, Dad loves Mom, Dad loves Mom. I even started to believe that—until he came back.”
A keening wail begins to rise up from Kir’s finger on the glass. It sounds like a ghost crying. “When he did, I saw that his shirt and hands were muddy and covered in blood. He looked like he’d been digging.”
“What did you do?”
“I kicked the door open. Asked him what he did to her.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me to go back to bed.”
My eyebrows lift. “That’s it?”
“I pressed as much as I could. I told him I saw. I told him I saw him crush the pills. I told him I saw him carry her out. He said she was very sick and she was in a lot of pain and that I didn’t understand. I said I understood fine. I said he killed her.”
“Did he deny it?”
He shakes his head. “No. No, he didn’t. He just looked at me and said I’d understand when I was older.”
I feel sick in a way I’ve never felt before. Sick from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. But we’re at a treacherous moment, and he needs me right now. So I ask, “Do you? Understand, I mean?”
Kir nods. “Yeah. I do.” He throws back the last dregs of his liquor.
“I understand that my mother wanted to leave him, and so my father decided that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could.
That’s how he works. He doesn’t let go. He’d rather destroy something than watch it walk away from him.
” He plunks the glass back down. “She was the purest thing I’ve ever had in my cursed fucking life, and he took her away.
Maybe we could’ve found a way past that—I don’t know how, but maybe—if he hadn’t then spent the next two decades erasing every trace of her.
He closed up the house and burned every photograph. He made sure she was gone for good.”
My throat aches, but not only for the obvious reasons. There’s something in me that recognizes the guilt that Lukas must feel—because I’ve erased things, too. A hidden photo album labeled Tax Docs 2019 hides my greatest shame.
I know what it’s like to bury someone who’s still alive.
And before I can think about it, before I can weigh the words or wonder why they’re coming out shaped this way, I ask, “What do you think she’d say if she could see you now?”
It’s a strange question. I know it the second it leaves my mouth. A good reporter would ask What happened next or Where is she buried or Do you have proof for what you’re saying.
But then again, the question is not really about Elena.
It’s about a hospital bracelet on a tiny, chubby wrist. A little girl whose hair must be red, though I can’t possibly know for sure. It’s about whether I did the right thing.
Kir goes completely still. For a long time, he doesn’t speak, move, or breathe, and I mirror him.
Then he sets the glass down, pushes his chair back, and stands. “She’d say I waited too long to avenge her.”
He walks away. The window opens.
And Kir melts into the night.