Liv #2
I hand him the phone without quite deciding to, the same way I did the night before, like some part of me has already learned that handing him the worst of it doesn't make things heavier, it makes them lighter.
He reads it in silence. I watch his jaw work, watch the easy, sleep-loose warmth drain slowly out of his face, replaced by something still and careful, the way a man gets right before he decides not to be careful anymore.
"By Monday," he repeats, flat.
"That's Cole. Always thinking three steps ahead, usually for himself." I try to make it sound light and fail completely, my voice cracking on the last word. "I used to think it was a good quality in him. Ambition. Drive. I told myself someday it would make him a good businessman."
"It's making him something," Volody says, "but I don't think good is the word I'd reach for."
"He wants to know how fast you move on these things." I say it out loud just to hear how absurd it sounds. "People are asking him questions. He needs an answer."
"What people?"
"I don't know." And that's the part that scares me most, saying it out loud.
"I don't know who he owes, or what he's promised, or how deep this actually goes.
I keep thinking I know my own brother, and then he sends something like this, and I realize I've been building an entire person out of memories that are years out of date. "
Volody is quiet for a long moment, phone still in his hand, thumb moving absently over the screen like he's reading it again even though I know he isn't, he's thinking, working something out behind those dark eyes that have gone sharp and focused in a way I'm starting to recognize.
"Has he always been like this?" he asks. "Or is this new?"
"He was sweeter, before. Softer." I pull the sheet up around me, suddenly cold despite the sun pouring in.
"After our parents died, I used to find him crying in his room and not know what to say, so I'd just sit with him until he fell asleep.
I gave up a scholarship to stay close to home for him.
I turned down a job in another city because he asked me to, in that quiet voice he used to have before he learned the other one, the one that sounds like he's always closing a deal.
" My throat tightens. "I don't know when the soft version of him went away.
I just know that by the time I noticed, he'd already turned into someone else. "
"That's not nothing, Liv. That's not a brother making a bad call under pressure. That's a pattern." Volody sets the phone down carefully, like it might go off in his hands. "I've known plenty of men who got desperate once and did something stupid. This doesn't read like that."
My chest goes tight, because some small, stubborn part of me has been holding onto the version of Cole I raised, the boy who used to fall asleep against my shoulder during thunderstorms, and I don't know how to reconcile that boy with the man writing deadlines about my own life like it's a quarterly filing.
"What aren't you saying," I ask, watching his face.
"I'm not saying anything yet, because I don't know anything yet." He reaches over, takes my hand, presses a kiss to my knuckles like he's trying to anchor both of us at once. "But I intend to."
"Volody."
"I'm not going to do anything that hurts you, Liv.
I need you to hear that clearly." His thumb traces slow circles over my hand.
"But your brother just sent you a message that sounds less like a man asking his sister for a favor and more like a man under enough pressure to start spending things that don't belong to him.
I'd like to understand exactly what that pressure is, and exactly who's applying it. "
"Why does it matter to you? You barely know either of us."
"Because whatever this is," he says, gesturing vaguely between us, "I don't intend to let your brother's fuck-ups decide the future of it.
And because the version of you I watched walk back into that room last night, chin up, after finding out what your own family did to you, that version deserves to know the whole truth, not just the parts Cole feels like handing over a text at a time. "
Gratitude and grief war in my chest. Nobody has ever offered to fight for the truth on my behalf before.
I've spent six years being the one who finds things out the hard way and handles them alone.
Having someone volunteer to stand beside me while I do it feels almost disorienting, like learning to walk on a leg I didn't know I'd been favoring.
"What do you need from me?" I ask.
"Nothing yet. Just don't answer him today. Let him sit in his own silence for a while and see how he likes it." A faint, humorless smile flickers across his mouth. "You’ve sacrificed enough for him, Liv. Don’t let him take your peace, too. Not now.”
I nod, even though every old, well-worn instinct in me wants to text back immediately, smooth things over, make sure he's okay, the way I've done on autopilot for six straight years. It takes real, deliberate effort to set the phone face down on the nightstand instead and leave it there.
Volody watches me do it, something proud and careful moving behind his eyes, like he understands exactly how much that small motion cost me.
"Good girl," he says, quiet, not the teasing kind from last night, something gentler underneath it, and it warms me despite everything else churning in my mind.
He gets up not long after, pulls on a pair of sweatpants, and disappears toward the kitchen.
I hear him on the phone a few minutes later, voice low and clipped in a way I haven't heard from him yet, all the warmth and humor stripped out of it, replaced by something efficient and a little frightening.
"Find out who he owes and what his motives are," he says, and I go very still in the bed, listening despite myself. "I don't care how deep you have to go. I want names by midday."
The phone clicks off. The apartment goes quiet except for the hum of the espresso machine starting up, ordinary and domestic against everything that conversation just implied.
Twelve hours ago I was an unwilling line item in an auction. This morning I'm something a man is willing to make calls about before his first coffee.
I don't know yet whether that makes me safer or more frightened. Possibly both.
But when he comes back into the bedroom a few minutes later, two mugs of coffee in hand, easy smile already sliding back into place like the call never happened, I find myself reaching for him anyway, because for the first time since I opened that folder at Pietty's front door, I'm not facing whatever comes next alone.