Katerina
Five Years Later
My life has become quiet in all the ways that matter and dangerous in all the ways that don’t show on the surface.
From the outside, nothing looks wrong.
We live in my father’s house again. The twins have a bright nursery on the second floor, though they are much too old now for anyone to keep calling it that. My mother has moved back into the center of the household without ever formally reclaiming the place she lost years ago.
My father has become gentler with me in public, softer with the children, more attentive to my mother than he has been in years.
At dinner, the staff stand straighter when Sofia laughs.
Men lower their voices when Nikolai enters a room, as if even at four years old they can already sense something in him worth watching.
That’s the part I hate.
Not the comfort. Not the stability. Not the fact that the children have grown up in warm rooms instead of rented apartments and hiding places.
What I hate is the watching.
By nine in the morning, the twins have already torn through the breakfast room like a storm.
Sofia leaves jam on the edge of the tablecloth and tells everyone she did not, even while the spoon is still in her hand.
Nikolai carefully separates the berries from his porridge and lines them up in a perfect row before eating them one by one.
He’s neater than Sofia, quieter than Sofia, and entirely too observant for his age.
When something is wrong in a room, his face changes before mine does.
This morning, it changes when Papa walks in.
He enters the breakfast room in a dark suit with the newspaper folded under his arm and every conversation in the house shifts a little around him, as if the air itself has learned to make room.
Sofia shouts, “Deda!” and throws herself at him without hesitation.
Nikolai does not run. He slides off his chair and waits.
My father notices that too.
He bends to kiss Sofia’s head first, then rests a hand on Nikolai’s shoulder. It should be ordinary. Grandfatherly. Sweet, even.
Instead, something inside me tightens.
Because it’s never just that with Sergei Markov.
Nothing with him is ever only what it looks like.
“How is my boy?” he asks.
Nikolai looks up at him with those steady, storm-colored eyes that still, even after four years, can catch me off guard. Sofia has my face, my drama, my easy smile. Nikolai has my stillness and someone else’s eyes.
Someone else’s everything, some days.
“I’m fine,” he says with the solemnity of a small old man.
Papa’s mouth curves. “Good. Come with me after breakfast. I want to show you something.”
Before Nikolai can answer, I do it for him. “He has a lesson with his tutor.”
Papa looks at me over Sofia’s hair. “Then after the lesson.”
“He’s four.”
“Yes,” he says mildly. “And very bright.”
That’s how it always starts.
My son is too young to understand what’s going on. But I do, and it’s been pressing on me since I made the difficult decision to come back here.
A walk in the garden with Papa and two of his men trailing a polite distance behind. A paperweight placed in Nikolai’s hands. A question asked and praised when answered carefully. A story about our family told in a voice warm enough to sound like love.
Mama comes in a few seconds later and saves me from answering.
She’s wearing cream this morning, her hair pinned loosely, no jewelry except the thin gold chain she never takes off.
She looks younger now than she did when I came home pregnant and silent, maybe because the children have given her something to hold that’s not regret.
Sofia runs to her, too. Mama lifts her with a small laugh and sits at the head of the table without asking anyone’s permission. Four years ago, that would have meant something. It still does, just more quietly.
My stepmother arrives sometime late.
And when she arrives, she’s dressed beautifully, lips painted, face smooth as polished stone.
Vika comes in behind her, equally flawless, equally cold.
There is no grief left in Vika’s face now, only shape and calculation.
Lev has been dead for years, but in this house, grief is useful for only so long.
After that, it becomes another piece of furniture people stop seeing unless they trip over it.
She sees me looking and smiles.
I look away first because I do not have the energy for her before ten o’clock.
That should have ended the speculation.
It did not.
Papa asked for the real name. I did not give it.
Irina looked at me as if silence itself were filth.
Vika never believed me. Not once. Even now, if she catches Nikolai at the right angle, when the light catches his face and turns his eyes that exact impossible color, something ugly flickers through hers.
She still thinks the children are Lev’s.
Or wants to. In this house, belief is less important than usefulness.
A lie that helps someone often lives longer than the truth.
It no longer matters what she thinks.
What matters is that Papa has chosen to take an interest in Nikolai.
That was not true when the twins were babies.
Back then, he kept his distance, outwardly offended by my silence and privately curious enough to stay close.
He visited the nursery more often than he admitted.
He brought toys too expensive for toddlers and stood over their cots with an expression I never learned to read.
Then the children grew.
Sofia remained all delight and noise and reckless affection. She throws herself into every room as if she owns it and expects to be adored. She probably will be, for the rest of her life.
Nikolai became careful.
He watches before he speaks. He remembers everything.
He never forgets where people put their keys, their cigarettes, their tempers.
When one of the housemaids cried in the kitchen last week because her husband had been taken in for gambling debts, Nikolai found her later and gave her his favorite toy car because, as he explained to me that night, she looked like she had forgotten something kind existed.
Papa saw that. He sees everything he can use.
By the time breakfast ends, I’m holding myself together with the kind of brittle patience women in my family learn young.
Sofia is taken upstairs with her nanny to wash jam from her hands. Nikolai is about to follow when Papa rests that same hand on his shoulder again.
“Five minutes,” he says. “Then lessons.”
Nikolai glances at me.
The look is small. Easy to miss.
But I see the question in it.
I smile because he needs that from me more than honesty. “Five minutes.”
He goes with Papa.
Mama watches them leave and says nothing until the room is mostly empty.
Then, quietly, “You should not let him see your fear.”
I stare at the untouched coffee in front of me. “I’m not afraid.”
Mama gives me the look mothers reserve for lies too transparent to challenge directly.
I exhale. “I’m afraid of the wrong things.”
She reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers. “No. You’re afraid of the right thing. That’s why you’re still a good mother in this house.”
That almost undoes me.
Because this house is not built for good mothers.
It’s built for obedient daughters, decorative wives, strategic sons.
I stand too quickly and tell myself I only need to check on Sofia. Instead, I walk to the study.
The door is slightly open.
Papa stands by the window with his coffee. Nikolai is in the leather chair across from the desk, his feet nowhere near the floor, the silver wolf paperweight in his hands.
“A man does not answer too quickly,” Papa is saying. “If he answers too quickly, he gives other people what they want.”
Nikolai frowns. “How long should he wait?”
Papa smiles. “Long enough to make them uncomfortable.”
I push the door fully open.
The room shifts.
Papa turns to me, unsurprised.
“Papa,” I say. “He’s just a kid, we should put him in preschool. Sofia, too.”
“Nonsense,” he says. “School is too dangerous for someone like us. He has his tutors, and besides, even you never went to school.”
I laugh. “And look how it turned out for me.”
He narrows his eyes. “We should count our blessings, and the children are mine.” He doesn’t have to say it, but I get what he means, and it makes something ugly go through me. My children are bastards, and he gave them his name. I should be grateful for that.
That’s what makes me sick.
Mama appears in the doorway before the moment can harden further.
“Sergei,” she says, as if she has been there longer than either of us realized. “The Kurylenko call is waiting.”
Papa looks at her, then at me, then at Nikolai tucked against my side.
Something unreadable passes over his face.
Finally, he says, “Go to your lesson, Kolya.”
Nikolai nods. I take him out of the room without another word.
In the hall, he tilts his face up to mine. “Did I do something bad?”
The question slices clean through me.
“No, baby.”
“Then why are you angry?”
I crouch so we are eye level. “I’m not angry with you.”
He considers this. “You were angry like when Sofia colored on the dog.”
I almost laugh. Almost. “I was angry at grown-ups,” I say. “That’s different.”
He seems to accept this and takes my hand.
Sofia crashes into us at the end of the hall, smelling of soap and rebellion, and the moment breaks. She’s furious because her nanny brushed her hair ‘too straight,’ and she needs me to fix it immediately because apparently that’s now a crisis of state.
I let the children pull me back into their little world.
That’s how I survive here.
Not by fighting every battle the moment it appears. I would die tired if I tried. I survive by anchoring myself to them. To Sofia’s outrage over hair. To Nikolai’s careful little silences. To bath time, tutors, stories, socks lost under beds, oatmeal spilled on tablecloths.
The rest of the house can be angry all it likes.
My children are still children.
For now, that has to be enough.