41. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
The page had been blank for the better part of an hour, and I had filled that hour instead with everything a page did not require.
Three cups of tea had gone cold at my elbow. A pen turned end over end between my fingers until the click of it became its own kind of stalling. Four other pages lay balled up in the trash can beside the table, each one abandoned somewhere around the second sentence.
I had owed this woman a letter for six years, and I had never once managed to write past her name.
Dear Mrs. Sokolov. I had written that much a hundred times in my head over the years, standing in doorways, lying awake in apartments I never let myself get too comfortable in.
Every single time, the sentence that followed it dissolved before I could pin it to anything solid enough to send.
Isla set a fresh cup down beside the cold ones without asking whether I wanted it, the way she had learned to do most things I needed before I found the words to ask for them.
"How's it going?" she asked, though she could see the trash can as well as I could.
"Poorly."
"You've been at this for an hour."
"I am aware of the math."
She pulled out the chair across from me instead of leaving, which I had half expected her to do, and folded her hands on the table like she intended to sit there until I either finished the letter or explained why I could not.
"You do not have to stay for this."
"I know I don't have to." She said it plainly, without a trace of the argument I had braced for. "I want to."
I looked down at the blank page again, at the four words sitting alone at the top of it, and found I had nothing else to offer her except the truth of exactly how stuck I was.
"I do not know how to tell a woman that her son died because of me without also telling her that he did not die because of me at all. Both of those things are true, and I have never once found a way to say them in the same sentence."
"Then don't put them in the same sentence." Isla reached across the table and turned the pen so it pointed toward me instead of away.
"Say the first one. Then say the second one. Let them sit next to each other on the page the same way they've been sitting next to each other in your head for six years."
I stared at her for a long moment, struck, as I often was, by how she managed to make the impossible sound like a checklist.
"That is deceptively simple advice."
"Most good advice is." She stood, pressed a kiss to the top of my head, and left me alone with the page, the same trust she extended to harder things, certain I would ask if I actually needed her there.
I picked up the pen.
Dear Mrs. Sokolov,
You do not know me, though I suspect my name has lived somewhere in your house for six years the way a splinter lives under skin, small and constant and impossible to forget about entirely. My name is Nikolai Stepanov. I served with your son.
I stopped there, the pen hovering, and let myself remember him properly for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit.
I skipped past the last four minutes of his life, which I had relived more times than I could count, and settled instead on the ordinary version of him that existed before that night ever came for any of us.
Pasha laughed at everything, including things that were not funny, simply because he had decided somewhere along the way that laughing cost nothing and might occasionally help.
He ate with his elbows on the table no matter how many times Grisha told him it was uncivilized.
He asked me once, months before the fire, why I never told anyone what I actually thought about anything, and I gave him some deflection I no longer remembered, and he let it go the way he let most things go, easily, without needing to win.
He was terrible at cards and worse at pretending he was not. Dima used to fleece him twice a week, and Pasha kept sitting back down anyway, convinced the next hand owed him something the last one had not. I have not played a single game of cards since.
I wrote some version of that down too. Not all of it. Enough.
Your son did not die because I failed him. I want you to hear that clearly, because I have spent six years afraid that somewhere in this city a mother believed exactly that, and I could not fix it from a distance the way I have tried to fix everything else in my life.
He died because a man named Orlov wanted power he could not take while your son's crew stood in his way. He set a fire in a warehouse to clear a path to it, then built an entire company afterward out of the same particular cruelty.
The report you received called it a faulty circuit breaker. It was arson. I have the paperwork now, in writing, confirming exactly that, years after the case first closed on a lie.
I am sending a copy with this letter so you no longer have to take my word for any of it.
Cruz had put that confirmation directly into my hands, in a hospital room only days after the fire, and said the words out loud before I ever had to read them for myself.
I had carried the folder home instead of leaving it behind, hands steadier than they had been in longer than I wanted to admit, and had known immediately that the first thing I owed anyone with that paperwork was this exact letter.
I carried him four steps before the ceiling took him from my hands. I have relived those four steps more times than I can count, and I no longer believe there was a fifth one available to either of us that night.
There is no version of it where I hold on tighter or move faster and he walks out of that building instead of me. I spent years hunting the man responsible for taking that fifth step away from us. I found him.
He will spend whatever life he has left answering for it in a courtroom instead of a boardroom, which is a smaller justice than I once wanted for him, and somehow the only kind that ever actually mattered.
I do not know what comfort any of this offers a woman who has lived this long without her son.
I suspect none of it undoes a single day of that grief.
I am writing it anyway, because you deserved the truth six years ago and I was not brave enough to give it to you, and I have decided that a truth this late is still better than a silence that never ends.
Your son was the best of the four of us who walked into that building. I have believed that every single day since, and I intend to keep believing it for as many years as I have left, the years he never got the chance to have.
I did not know how to close a letter like this one, so I did not try. I simply signed my name and let the rest of it stand exactly as honest as I had managed to make it.
I read it through once, twice, checking every line the way I checked a room before I let anyone I loved walk into it, and found nothing in it I wanted to take back. Some letters were not meant to feel finished. They were only meant to finally exist.
I folded it once, slid it into an envelope with the copied arson report behind it, and sealed it with more care than the task strictly required, running my thumb along the edge like I could press six years of silence into the fold and leave it there.
I sat with it a long moment after that, the sealed envelope resting flat on the table in front of me, feeling something in my chest I did not immediately recognize because it had been absent for so long. It took me a moment to name it.
Relief. It was plain and uncomplicated, the kind I had stopped expecting to feel about anything connected to that warehouse.
I put on my coat and walked to the mailbox on the corner instead of waiting for morning, because I had waited six years already and did not trust myself to wait one more night without finding some new reason to postpone it again.
The street sat quiet in the particular way it always did at that hour, ordinary in a way I was still learning to trust instead of doubt.
I slid the envelope through the slot and heard it land somewhere in the dark below, gone, out of my hands in every sense that mattered.
I stood there a moment longer than necessary, the way a person stands at a grave they have finally gotten around to visiting, and then I turned and walked home.
Grisha and Dima did not have anyone left waiting on a letter. Grisha's parents had died years before the fire ever took him, and Dima's family had never once looked for him, even while he was still alive. Pasha's mother was the only debt left on that particular ledger, and I had finally paid it.
Isla was at the kitchen table when I came back in, a book open in front of her that she was not actually reading, the particular stillness of someone who had been listening for the door.
"You actually mailed it."
"I did."
"How do you feel?"
I considered the question honestly instead of reaching for the easy answer, the one that would have ended the conversation two words sooner.
"Lighter. Which surprises me. I did not expect a stamp to do what six years of trying could not."
She reached across the table and took my hand, turning it over gently, the same unhurried attention she gave a hundred things of mine by now, out of habit more than necessity.
I did something then I had not planned on doing, something that arrived in my body before I had fully decided on it in my mind. I pulled my hand back, not away from her, and reached instead for the cuff of my left sleeve.
I rolled it up slowly, past the wrist, past the place where the graft had never taken cleanly the first time, all the way to the elbow, into the open kitchen light with nobody's hand forcing me to do it and no excuse waiting to explain it away afterward.
Isla went very still, watching me do it, her eyes moving over the scarring the way they always did, careful and unflinching, though this time there was no bandage between us, no supply closet, no reason at all except that I had decided, somewhere on the walk home, that I was finished being the only person who got to see it in full light.
I did not say anything. There was nothing left in me that needed saying out loud, not after the letter, not after six years of choosing exactly which parts of myself were safe enough to show her.
She did not say anything either. She simply reached out and rested her palm flat against my forearm, over the worst of it, the same steady weight she had used the very first time she touched that scar in a supply closet with a stranger's blood not yet washed off her hands.
I let her.
It was the smallest gesture I had ever allowed myself, and somehow the largest one of my life.