23. If that is what you decide, I will take you. （Tamara）
IF THAT IS WHAT YOU DECIDE, I WILL TAKE YOU. (TAMARA)
When I get home, Aleksander is in the study, jacket off, sleeves rolled to his forearms, three screens open in front of him. He takes in the signed scope beneath my arm, the material tube in my hand, the grin I can’t seem to contain.
“It went well, I see.”
“Amelia kept me on the project.” I set the agreement on the edge of his desk. “She expanded the scope. And,” I drop into the chair across from him and slip out of my coat, “she may refer one of her bougie friends.”
One corner of his mouth shifts. “Smart woman.”
Seeing him like this, with that faintly satisfied expression, his hair slightly disordered, the top buttons of his shirt undone, pulls me straight back to last night.
His hand at my jaw. The rough way he said my name before he walked away.
I blink myself back into the study. “Thank you for today,” I say.
His coffee sits cooling beside the keyboard. Without thinking, I reach for it and take a sip. Aleksander watches me drink from his cup and says nothing.
“Your brother is terrifyingly competent,” I say too quickly, catching myself and setting it down.
“He knows when to pull himself together.”
“That must be exhausting for him.”
A quiet breath of amusement leaves him. Then his eyes settle on mine again. “Mikhail secured the room,” he says. “You kept the client.”
Before I can answer, my phone vibrates inside my coat pocket.
Papa.
I consider ignoring it, but then I open the message.
Papa
Come see me tomorrow. We’ll discuss the boy.
The room tilts around me. Every sound disappears except the blood beating hard behind my ears.
Aleksander stands. “What’s wrong?”
“My father wants to see me.”
“Did he say why?”
I read the message again.
The boy.
Not his name. Never his name.
Just another piece on Papa’s board.
I could lie. The instinct arrives automatically, built through years of protecting the things that mattered from a man who believed knowledge meant ownership.
Instead, I hold out the phone.
Aleksander takes it. His expression doesn’t change as he reads. He hands it back without comment.
I wait for the question that should come automatically.
What boy?
It doesn’t come.
The silence stretches one second past comfortable, then another. He doesn’t look confused.
“You’re not going to ask me what boy?”
“No.” A beat passes. Then, finally, “I know.”
The words don’t make sense at first. Then they do. “What do you mean, you know?”
“I knew your father had leverage over you. You wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
“So you investigated me.”
“Yes.”
The blunt admission hits harder than a denial would have. “You went through my life.”
“Yes.”
“My medical records?”
“Yes.”
I stare at him. No excuse. No attempt to soften what he did. “How long ago?”
“A few days.”
A few days. The apartment. The market. Dinner with his family.
Last night.
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
“And you said nothing.”
“I was confirming the adoption trail and watching the household before Kalinin realized anyone had found it.”
The household. My pulse gives one violent beat.
“You know where my son is.”
Aleksander doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
“You decided what I was allowed to know.”
For the first time since I’ve known him, he looks like a man waiting to be sentenced.
“Yes.”
My anger sharpens. Good. I can use sharp. “You did exactly what he does.”
The words enter the room and alter its shape. Aleksander doesn’t look away.
“I was trying to stop him from moving your son before we controlled the route.”
“That doesn’t change what you did.”
“No.”
“You thought I couldn’t handle the truth.”
“I thought the moment you knew where he was, you would run toward him.”
“I would have.”
He does not insult me by commenting on that.
“So you decided for me.”
“Yes.”
The answer comes quieter this time. “I was wrong.”
I had been ready to fight his justification. The absence of one leaves me with nowhere to put the next blow.
Then Aleksander says, “I know what Yuri found. I don’t know what happened to you.”
He doesn’t ask me to tell him. I do anyway.
Maybe because he didn’t ask. Maybe because the not-asking is the first time anyone with power over my life has left the choice entirely mine.
I take one breath I don’t quite trust to be steady.
“I was twenty. My son’s father was Mark Callahan. He was studying medicine.” My grip tightens around the phone. “We met at NYU. He said he would follow me anywhere.”
The memories arrive too clearly. Mark laughing beneath summer rain. Mark dancing beside me at open-air concerts. Mark reading in bed. Mark pressing his hand against my stomach before there was anything to feel.
“We were crazy in love.”
Aleksander says nothing.
“Then Mark died in a car accident. I was pregnant and alone and stupid enough to think the worst thing that could happen already had.”
My voice starts to thin. I stop and force air into my lungs.
“When I gave birth, they told me my son had died. They put his body in my arms.” The baby was wrapped in white. Too small. Too quiet. I counted every finger because there was nothing else left to do.
“I named him after his father. I buried them beside each other. I visited their graves for eight years.”
Aleksander’s hand closes slowly against the edge of his desk.
“The rest you already know.” My voice turns bitter. “On the way to the cathedral, Papa told me the dead baby I held eight years ago wasn’t mine.”
The words still feel impossible.
“He said if I obeyed, I could see my son.”
His face has gone hard in a way that has nothing to do with me. There is no gentle place to put this.
Finally, he says, “I’m sorry, Tamara.”
The truth should make me feel lighter. It doesn’t. It feels like opening my chest and placing the worst part of me on his desk.
Aleksander crosses to the built-in cabinet beside the bookshelves and unlocks the lower drawer. He removes a thin black file, opens it, and takes out a photograph.
“This was taken Tuesday.”
The boy in the photograph is leaving a brick school building beside a dark-haired woman in a navy coat.
He holds several sheets of music in one hand.
His scarf hangs loose, one end nearly dragging.
He is looking up at the woman while making some urgent point, concentration pulling his brows together.
Her hand rests lightly against his shoulder.
I stop breathing. He looks like his father. Long legs. Dark curls. An entire face filled with thoughts I have never heard.
“That’s Mark?”
“Yes.”
My thumb touches the edge of the photograph.
“What is he called?”
“Ivan Morozov.”
The name hurts in a way I didn’t expect.
A name someone has used every day of his life. A name he turns toward when called.
“Is he healthy?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know he was adopted?”
“We haven’t confirmed that.”
“The woman?”
“Anna Morozov. She teaches at Hudson Valley Conservatory School.”
“His mother.”
The word catches in my throat. Aleksander doesn’t correct me.
“Her husband, Pavel, worked for your father. He was involved in removing Mark from the hospital. He died in a car accident eighteen months ago.”
“And Anna?”
“There’s no indication she knew the adoption was illegal.”
“She thinks he’s her son.”
“Yes.”
My attention shifts to the photograph again. Her hand at his shoulder. His body angled toward hers without thought or caution.
“Does she treat him well?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“We’ve watched them.”
The answer should make me recoil. Instead, I need more.
“He goes to school regularly. He has friends. Piano lessons. A recital this weekend. Anna’s parents are listed as emergency contacts. The neighbors know them. His teachers know him.” Aleksander pauses. “He’s loved, Tamara.”
The word breaks something open. I press the heel of my hand against my mouth.
Loved.
Thank God.
The relief is so enormous it becomes grief. All these years, some part of me imagined what he would have been like if he had lived. And now I know part of it, at least.
He has had birthday cakes. School pictures. Someone checking his temperature in the middle of the night. Someone who knows what he will and will not eat. Someone he calls when he is frightened.
I lower my hand. “Where is he?”
Aleksander removes a sheet from the file and places it on the desk between us. An address outside Woodstock, barely two hours away. Close enough that I could be there before dark.
My body moves before the thought finishes. I reach for my coat.
“Take me there.”
“I will.”
Aleksander’s gaze remains steady on mine. “If that’s what you decide, I will take you.”
My hand closes around the back of the chair.
“But you need to know what happens when we arrive.”
“He’s my son.”
“Yes.”
“I have spent eight years believing he was dead.”
“Yes.”
“Then what else is there?”
“Kalinin is still watching the household.”
The words cut through me. “How closely?”
“A vehicle connected to one of his companies passed the school twice this week. Not enough for them to notice. Enough to move them if he believes someone is getting close.”
The chair is the only reason I’m still standing.
“We can secure the roads and reach the house before Kalinin reacts,” Aleksander says.
“Then do it.”
“We can.”
He doesn’t raise his voice, and somehow that’s what makes me listen.
“But Mark will see armed strangers enter his home. He’ll see us take him from the woman he believes is his mother.”
I consider that. “He doesn’t know me.”
“No.”
The answer is soft. Still brutal. “He’ll think I’m going to hurt him.”
“Yes.”
I hate Aleksander for saying it. I hate him more because he is right.
“And if we approach Anna first?”
“We risk Kalinin learning about it before we know whether she’ll cooperate. If she panics, calls someone, or confronts anyone connected to Pavel, he could move them before we reach the house again.”
“So I do nothing?”
“No.” Aleksander steps closer but doesn’t touch me. “I’m not asking you to do nothing. I’m giving you the facts before you decide.”
I stare at the address. I could leave now. I could be outside that house tonight. I could stand across the road and watch my son through a window. The thought nearly pulls me apart. Then I look at Anna’s hand on his shoulder.
Not gripping. Guiding.
“She loves him.”
“Yes.”
“And he loves her.”
“Yes.”
I don’t cry. That feels almost worse. “She didn’t steal him.”
“No.”
“She thought it was legal.”
“That’s what the facts indicate.”
I sink into the chair because my legs no longer feel reliable. “I want my son back.”
“I know.”
“I want to walk into that school and take him home.”
“I know.”
“I want him to know me.”
Aleksander says nothing. There’s no answer that can make this hurt less.
I look at Ivan again. At Mark. At both of them. “We don’t tear him out of that house.”
Aleksander doesn’t move. “No.”
“I said we don’t. I didn’t say I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
The understanding in his voice hurts almost as much as the photograph. I pull the file toward me. More documents slide free. Hospital records. Adoption papers. Financial transfers.
Then another photograph. Mark Callahan stands outside a university building, one arm around my younger self.
I remember that day. He surprised me in St. Petersburg after I complained endlessly that Papa was forcing me to take an immersion language course.
I remember the sweater I was wearing. The coffee Mark spilled on his shoes five minutes later.
The argument we had that night over whether our child would have his name or mine.
“What’s this doing here?”
Aleksander’s attention shifts to the photograph. “There’s one more thing.”
His voice changes, and I know I don’t want the rest. “Tell me.”
“The accident that killed Mark wasn’t an accident.”
Something close to vertigo washes over me so fast that the photograph slips out of my grip. “No.”
“Yuri found evidence that it was an ordered hit.”
I don’t need to ask. “Papa killed him.”
“Everything points to Kalinin.”
“He killed the father of my child.”
“Yes.”
The room doesn’t move, but everything in me does. “Then stole my son from me.”
“Yes.” Aleksander’s jaw tightens.
I wait for grief. What comes instead is clarity. I pick up my phone and read the message again. Tomorrow, Papa will think I’m coming to beg for the truth. He has no idea the only leverage he had left is already gone.
Aleksander waits across from me, offering nothing I can attack. The truth is between us. So is what he did with it.
“I’m still furious with you,” I say.
“I know.”
“I don’t forgive you.”
“I know.”
With that, he turns and leaves the room.
For a long time, I stay frozen with my son’s photograph beneath my fingertips.
Ivan Morozov.
Age eight.
Mark.
Two names for one boy. Two lives laid over each other, neither one less real because the other exists.
Dark curls. Loose scarf. Sheet music bent slightly in one hand. His mouth open around some argument I will never hear.
My son is alive.
The thought should be enormous. It is enormous. Too large to hold all at once.
Instead, it keeps arriving in pieces.
He plays piano. He has friends. He almost walks into things when he is talking. He is loved.
That one breaks me each time.
I press my fingers to my mouth, but no sound comes out. I am past sobbing. Past the first shock. The grief has thinned into glass in water.
Papa killed Mark. Papa stole my son. Aleksander knew.
All three facts remain, and I don’t know which one gets to destroy me first.
The desk lamp throws a clean circle of light across the file.
Hospital records. Adoption papers. Financial transfers.
Photographs. Timelines. Names. The entire machinery of my life dismantled and laid out in organized black folders because Aleksander Sokolov does not do anything halfway, including violation.
I should still be furious. I am still furious. But underneath the anger is the part I hate most.
He gave me the address.
He could’ve kept it. He could’ve shown me the photograph and withheld the street name. He could’ve said not yet, not safe, trust me. He could’ve done what powerful men always do—wrapped control in concern and expected gratitude for the ribbon.
He didn’t. He put the address between us and waited.
If that’s what you decide, I will take you.
I close my eyes. That’s what makes it worse.
Cruel men are easier. Cruel men take and take, and the only work required of you is survival.
Attentive men make you decide what kind of damage matters.
The closed door gives me exactly what I asked for.
I hate it.
Aleksander is somewhere on the other side of the wall because he chose not to decide what I needed tonight. I hate that line almost as much as I need it. I hate that he understood the wound exactly, then stepped away from it with his hands open.
I read my father’s message again.
Tomorrow, I will sit across from Papa with my son’s address in my pocket.
And for the first time in my life, he will be the one speaking into a room where I know more than he thinks I do.