9 #2
"He's not a saint. He's just consistent, which in our line of work is rarer than people think.
" Vadim reached for the vodka, poured a round for everyone but me, the old habit none of them had ever broken even though I'd been old enough to drink for nine years.
"Consistency's the only thing that's ever actually kept any of us safe.
Not loyalty, not love, not any of the things people write songs about.
Just a man doing exactly what he says he's going to do, every single time, until you can set your whole life by it. "
I thought, holding my water glass instead of vodka, about exactly how thoroughly I'd come to understand that same consistency from an angle none of them suspected, and said nothing, and let the conversation move past me into safer water.
It was after dinner, washing dishes side by side at the sink while Vadim and Yegor argued good-naturedly about a football match neither of them had actually watched live, that Gleb spoke again, quieter this time, his hands moving through soapy water with the same methodical care he brought to everything.
"Can I tell you something," he said, "and have you not ask me follow-up questions about it yet."
"You can tell me anything, Gleb. You know that."
"I think Papa knew something was wrong before the accident.
Before — before everything." He kept his eyes on the plate in his hands, scrubbing at a spot that had already come clean.
"I found a note in one of the boxes. Just a few words, nothing that makes sense on its own.
But it's dated about three weeks before they died, and it doesn't read like a man worried about a missed shipment. "
My hands went still in the water. "What did it say?"
"I'm not ready to tell you yet. I want to be sure first, before I hand you something that might turn out to be nothing.
" He glanced at me, finally, something pleading underneath the careful blankness he usually wore.
"I need you to trust me on the timeline.
I'm not keeping it from you to keep it from you.
I just don't want to hand either of us a half-finished fear we can't put back down once it's out. "
"How long have you known about this note."
"Two weeks." He said it like a confession, which it was.
"I almost told you the night of the dinner, actually.
Before everything with Denis happened and there suddenly wasn't room in the evening for anything else.
I've been carrying it around since, trying to decide if I'm protecting you or just delaying something that's going to hurt regardless of when it lands. "
"Which do you think it's."
"Both, probably. I don't think those are as different as people pretend they are.
" He set the clean plate in the rack, finally, and looked at me directly, something raw moving across his face that he usually kept entirely contained.
"I miss them, Dari. Every single day, the same amount I missed them the first year, and I think some part of me has spent fifteen years needing the story to be simple — the Maletins, a territory dispute, something with edges I could actually hold onto and be angry at.
If it's not that simple, I don't know what I'm supposed to be angry at instead, and that scares me more than almost anything else in my life right now. "
I thought about my own half-finished fear sitting four feet away from this conversation, folded carefully inside me the way Gleb's note was apparently folded inside a box in our office, and understood, with a clarity that startled me, that we were both doing exactly the same thing to each other that week — loving each other while keeping the one thing that mattered most carefully, deliberately unsaid.
I set down my own dish towel and pulled him into a hug, the kind we hadn't exchanged easily since we were teenagers, both of us too proud and too grief-stiff for most of our twenties to reach for each other without an excuse.
He held on longer than I expected him to, his chin resting against the top of my head the way our father used to hold our mother, an inherited gesture none of us had ever discussed inheriting.
"Okay," I said, into his shoulder. "I trust you. Take whatever time you need."
"Thank you." He pulled back, composed again almost instantly, the careful blankness sliding back into place like a door closing gently rather than slamming.
We finished the dishes without saying anything else about it, though I caught him watching me twice more before we left, like he was weighing whether the trade we'd just made — his silence for my patience — had actually been a fair one, or whether he already suspected I was making the exact same trade with him in reverse.
Yegor left first, the way he always did when something was pulling at him, kissing the top of my head on his way out with a brightness that didn't fully reach his eyes.
I watched him go and thought, not for the first time that month, that our family had become a small, loving conspiracy of people each protecting the others from something, none of us quite willing to say out loud what any of it actually was.
I drove home past Zarya's dark windows, the building quiet for the night, and thought about Rurik's name landing in Vadim's mouth so easily, so without weight, while I sat four feet away holding my own weight so carefully I'd nearly dropped a butter knife twice.
Vadim's praise of him sat with me longer than I wanted it to — he's just consistent, which in our line of work is rarer than people think — because I understood, better than Vadim could have known, exactly how much that consistency was currently bending itself around me in private, and exactly how much it would cost him with my brothers if any of them ever learned how far the bending had gone.
I understood, driving home that Sunday, that the secret I'd asked him to help me keep wasn't going to get easier the longer it lasted inside a family built out of people who noticed things.
It was going to get harder, every single week, until something gave — Vadim's casual question at the dinner table, Gleb's careful watching, Yegor's own secrets running parallel to mine in a direction I still didn't understand.
We were four people who'd spent fifteen years becoming experts at reading each other's smallest tells, and somehow, that week, three of us were managing to keep something significant hidden from the other one anyway, as if love itself had taught us exactly the skills we now needed to use against each other.
I just didn't yet know which thing was going to give first, or how loud it was going to be when it finally did, or which of us would be left standing closest to the wreckage when it happened.