44. Tasha
TASHA
Hollis's office looked like a paper avalanche had stopped mid-fall, file folders stacked waist-high along one wall, evidence boxes labeled in a handwriting too neat for how exhausted she clearly was, a single window doing its best against all that fluorescent light and losing.
I'd been in here three times in four days now, and every time the stacks had grown instead of shrunk, which she assured me was a good sign, not a bad one.
"The east wing safe alone gave us eleven pieces with documentation problems." Hollis didn't look up from the folder in front of her, flipping through pages with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd stopped being surprised by anything Kessler's records revealed.
"Four of them match entries in your grandfather's ledger fragment.
The rest connect through separate consignment trails we're still tracing. "
"What happens to them now?" I set my own copy of the fragment on the desk between us, the corners soft from handling, and made myself ask the question I'd been circling for two days instead of dancing around it any longer. "Realistically."
"Honestly? If nobody pushes, most of it disappears back into private hands within a year.
Quiet settlements, sealed provenance, a museum that doesn't ask hard questions because a donation solves a budget problem.
" She finally looked up, and something in her face had gone careful, like she already knew which answer I wanted and wasn't going to hand it to me easily.
"That's the normal outcome. I want you to understand that before you tell me what you actually want. "
"I don't want normal." I said it plainly, because two days of circling had worn the hesitation off it.
"I want restitution. Real restitution, with documentation, with the families notified where we can find them, with my grandfather's name attached to the record instead of buried under Kessler's paperwork like one more asset that got seized. "
Hollis studied me for a long moment, and something that might have been respect moved behind her tired eyes.
"That's slower. Considerably slower. It means hearings, historians, lawyers who bill by the hour arguing about provenance gaps from decades ago.
It means your name attached to every one of those hearings too, publicly, for years. "
"I know how slow it is. I do this for a living.
" I held her gaze, steady, the same steadiness I'd built a whole career on long before any of this started.
"My grandfather spent a decade being useful to people who never once had to answer for what they took.
I'm not letting his last contribution to this be one more quiet disappearance.
If it takes years, it takes years. I'd rather it be right than fast."
"Most people don't choose the harder version once I lay it out this plainly." Hollis leaned back, studying me with something that had shifted from professional courtesy into genuine interest. "What makes you different?"
"He carried this for a decade because he didn't think he had a choice, and it ate him alive quietly enough that nobody ever noticed until he was gone.
" I kept my voice even, though the words cost more than they should have this many months in.
"I have a choice. I intend to use it properly, even if that takes longer than easy would. "
"Then we do it right." Hollis closed the folder and reached for a fresh legal pad, already sketching the shape of a process I recognized from a career of watching institutions move slower than justice deserved.
"I'll need your authentication work formalized.
Sworn statements. A timeline connecting the ledger to specific pieces. "
"You'll have it by the end of the week."
"You've already started, haven't you." It wasn't really a question.
"Two nights ago." I almost smiled. "I couldn't sleep anyway."
"Of course you couldn't." Hollis made a note, then looked up again, her voice softening by a degree most people wouldn't have caught.
"For what it's worth, I've built cases against men like Kessler for eleven years, and the families rarely get anything back that actually matters to them.
Money, sometimes. An apology nobody sincere ever writes.
This is different. This is a name and a story instead of a number on a settlement.
That matters more than you're giving yourself credit for right now. "
"It matters to me too." I gathered the fragment back into my bag, careful with it the same way I was careful with everything my grandfather had touched. "It's the last thing I can actually do for him. I intend to do it properly."
I sat with that sentence the whole drive back to the compound, turning it over the way I used to turn over a difficult attribution, checking it from every angle for the crack I expected to find.
There wasn't one. For two months I had carried my grandfather's silence like something shameful, a family secret to manage instead of a story that deserved daylight, and somewhere between Hollis's stacked folders and my own steady voice saying restitution instead of settlement, the shame had finally let go of its grip on me entirely.
Whatever came next for me, personally, would have to wait its turn.
This part I owed to him first, and I intended to see it through before I let myself think about anything else.
The days after that blurred into paperwork and phone calls, historians in three countries returning my emails at strange hours, a retired archivist in Kyiv who cried on the phone when I read her the names from the ledger and recognized one of them as her own great uncle.
I slept badly and ate standing up and didn't mind either one, because for the first time in months the exhaustion belonged to something I was building instead of something I was hiding from.
By the time I drove out to my mother's apartment four days later, I had a folder of my own started, thinner than Hollis's stack but growing the same honest way, one confirmed name at a time.
Grisha dropped me at the curb instead of coming up, some careful instinct in him deciding my mother deserved one more visit without a stranger in her kitchen before she met him for real, and I watched him do his habitual sweep of the street through the rearview mirror before he pulled away, eyes moving window to window, car to car, the same unhurried scan he ran on every room he walked into.
My mother, watching from the front window with a dish towel still in her hands, apparently caught the whole thing.
"Tashenka." She pulled the door open before I'd finished climbing the stairs, already reaching for me, and the hug she gave me lasted longer than either of us probably intended, warm and solid and smelling like the same soap she'd used my whole life.
"Come in, come in. I made too much food.
I always make too much food when I'm nervous, and I have been nervous all week waiting to hear how the meeting with the agent went. "
The kitchen smelled like dill and butter and something with onions gone soft and sweet in a pan, no tension left in the air at all, none of the careful distance that had lived in this room for two months while I decided how much of the truth she could survive hearing.
The table was just a table now, scarred wood and mismatched chairs and a bowl of fruit nobody had touched in days, instead of the place where a trunk had once sat between us like a third person neither of us knew how to address.
"It went well." I sat down and let her put a plate in front of me before I'd even asked, same as always, the way I'd stopped minding somewhere in the last month. "Better than well. We're doing this properly, Mama. Restitution, not just a quiet settlement somebody signs and forgets."
"Tell me everything." She sat across from me, chin propped on one hand, and listened the way she used to when I was small enough to still believe every story I brought home from school mattered exactly as much as I thought it did.
I told her about Hollis's stacks of folders, about the archivist in Kyiv, about the eleven pieces and the four confirmed matches and the years this would probably take before any of it finished for good.
"Your grandfather would have hated all this attention." She said it fondly, shaking her head, but her eyes were bright in a way I hadn't seen in months. "And he would have been so proud of you he wouldn't have known what to do with his own hands."
"I think about that a lot. What he'd say if he could see any of this."
"He'd say you argue too much like him for your own good, and then he'd go quiet for an hour so nobody could see him getting emotional about it.
" She laughed, and the sound of it was lighter than I'd heard from her in years, unburdened, the kind of lightness that made something in my own chest loosen to match it.
"I am so relieved this is finally something we can just talk about at a table instead of something we tiptoe around. "
"Me too." I reached across and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back twice, the same small code we'd used since I was a child, still fine, still here. "No more hiding things from each other. I promised myself that after the storage unit, and I'm keeping it."
"Good. I am too old for secrets. They take too much energy, and I need mine for cooking." She topped off my tea without asking, then went quiet for a moment, studying me with the particular focus she used when she was working up to something. "So. The car outside."
"That was Grisha."
"I saw him from the window." She said it carefully, testing the name in her mouth the way she tested most things about my life lately, gently and without pressure. "He looked at the whole street like he half expected one of the cars to make a move. Twice. He did the same thing to the mailman."
"He does that everywhere. It's not personal." I felt my mouth pull into a smile I couldn't quite stop. "It's just how his brain works. He can't walk into a room, or apparently a street, without knowing every way out of it first."
"That is either very reassuring or very concerning, and I have not decided which yet." She studied me a moment longer, something soft moving behind the teasing. "When do I meet him properly? Not through a car window while he studies my street like it owes him something."
"Soon," I said, laughing. "And Mama, he's not that scary."
"He looked at a stranger like he was pricing a coffin. He's a little scary."
"He's had a complicated year." I laughed harder, and it filled the whole kitchen, easy and unguarded in a way nothing between us had been in months. "Give him a chance. He grows on you. I promise."
"Everything about this family grows on you eventually, apparently, whether you want it to or not.
" My mother refilled her own cup, settling back into her chair with the satisfied look of a woman who had gotten most of what she wanted out of an afternoon.
"Bring him for dinner. Properly, through the front door this time, not idling at the curb like he's planning an escape route. "
"I will." I meant it, and something in my chest settled at the saying of it, sturdier than almost anything else had felt in months. "Soon. I promise."
She reached over and topped off my tea again, though I hadn't finished the first cup, the same old habit she'd never once managed to break, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, the kitchen table between us held nothing but tea and fruit going soft in the bowl and the ordinary, unremarkable comfort of two people who had finally run out of things to hide.