13 #2
I thought, holding his hand, about every secret currently sitting inside my own chest — Rurik, the relationship neither of my brothers knew existed, that vertigo of loving a man whose own organization might somehow be tangled into whatever this note was circling toward.
I thought about how strange it was, that my family had become so practiced at protecting each other from the truth that we'd built an entire architecture of loving silences, each of us keeping a different door shut for what we told ourselves were good reasons, none of us quite realizing how many doors the rest of the family had quietly shut too.
"I can do that," I said, and meant it, even as some smaller, more honest part of me understood exactly how much harder that promise had just become, given who I'd been spending my stolen Tuesday afternoons with.
"Thank you." He squeezed my hand once and let go, gathering the folder back toward himself with the same careful, deliberate motion he brought to everything.
"I should go. Vadim will wonder why I'm out so late on a work night, and I'm not ready to explain any of this to him yet, not even the fact of it existing. "
"I won't say anything. To either of them."
"I know. That's the only reason I came to you first."
"Gleb." I caught his sleeve before he could stand fully.
"Whatever this turns out to be — whoever B.
turns out to be — I want you to promise me something too.
Don't carry it alone, the way you've apparently been carrying it for two weeks already.
Whatever you find, you tell me before you do anything else with it.
Not after. Not once you've already decided what it means. Before."
"I promise." Something in his expression eased, fractionally, the relief of a man who'd been bracing for resistance and received, instead, an open hand. "I think I needed someone to ask me for that. I've gotten dangerously comfortable carrying things by myself this year."
He left through the alley door, the same way Rurik always did, and I sat alone in my grandmother's office for a long while afterward, the photocopy of my father's last worried note still sitting on the desk where Gleb had left it, three words circling in my head with a persistence I couldn't shake loose. I don't like the way it works.
I read the note again, slower this time, trying to picture my father at his desk writing it — wherever that desk had been, in whatever room, late enough at night that he hadn't wanted to say any of it aloud to my mother yet, the lamp burning low while the rest of the house slept around him, unaware.
I wondered if he'd known, writing it, that he was running out of time to act on it carefully.
I wondered if some part of him had suspected, even then, that asking the question directly might cost him more than the discrepancy itself ever could have.
I would never know the answer to either question, and some nights I thought that not-knowing was its own particular cruelty, worse almost than the original loss — that I'd spent fifteen years grieving a story that might not have even been the true shape of what actually happened to him.
I thought about showing the note to Rurik.
Sitting with it that night, I thought about it seriously, turning the idea over from every angle I could manage, because some part of me had already started reflexively bringing him every weight I carried, the way you bring things to a person you've decided, somewhere along the way, to actually trust. He had access to records I didn't, contacts who could move through this organization's old paperwork in ways Gleb, working alone in stolen hours after his own shifts, simply couldn't match.
Telling him might mean finding the answer in days instead of months.
But this wasn't only mine to hand over. Gleb had trusted me with it specifically because he believed I'd protect it the way he was protecting it, carefully, quietly, until there was something solid enough to be useful rather than just frightening.
Handing it to Rurik — even Rurik, even the version of him I'd come to know in kitchens and back rooms and on a boat named after his dead mother — would have been a betrayal of the one promise I'd just made my brother, the same night I'd made it.
And there was something else underneath that calculation too, something I didn't examine as closely as I probably should have: a small, persistent fear that if the note ever did point somewhere inside Rurik's own organization, telling him too early might put him in an impossible position, forced to choose between loyalty to whoever B.
turned out to be and whatever he and I had built in the months since a federal marshal walked into my dining room.
I wasn't ready to test that particular weight yet. I wasn't certain either of us was.
I locked the note in the bottom drawer of the desk, the one with the broken lock my grandmother had never bothered fixing because nobody who mattered had ever needed to break into it, and went upstairs to an apartment that suddenly felt considerably less safe than it had felt the week before, the photograph of my parents on the shelf watching me with an expression I'd never once read as worried until tonight.
I didn't sleep much either, that night. I lay awake running through every man I could think of whose name began with B — men from the neighborhood, men I'd served tea to a hundred times, men whose faces I could picture clearly and whose culpability I couldn't begin to imagine — and found, somewhere around three in the morning, that I'd exhausted every name except the one Gleb himself hadn't said out loud, and that the silence where that name should have been sat in my chest like a held breath I didn't yet have the courage to release.
I understood, lying awake in the dark, that whatever this turned out to be, I had just become someone who was keeping two enormous secrets from two different people I loved, and that both secrets, somehow, against every instinct telling me they couldn't possibly be connected, kept circling back toward the exact same world — the one Rurik ran, the one my brothers served, the one that had apparently decided, fifteen years ago, that my family's grief was an acceptable price for somebody else's convenience.
I fell asleep eventually, somewhere past four, and dreamed of my father's handwriting stretching across pages that kept multiplying every time I tried to read them to the end, the ink rearranging itself faster than I could ever hope to follow, line after line, as though the truth itself were still deciding what shape it wanted to take before it finally let me read it.