13. Zoya
ZOYA
Six years later, I cry in the kindergarten parking lot.
I try to do it quietly, because there are other parents everywhere and I still have some dignity left, but the sunglasses are not doing as much work as I hoped.
The school looks too cheerful for emotional destruction.
Yellow walls, painted flowers near the entrance, tiny shoes lined up outside classrooms, teachers bending down to greet children like this is a normal day and not the day my daughters officially begin leaving me in small, socially acceptable stages.
Mila runs ahead first, backpack bouncing against her shoulders.
Nadia follows with one hand gripping her water bottle and the other clutching the strap of her bag like she’s going into battle.
“Mila, slow down,” I call after her.
Mila turns around while still moving and says, “I know where I’m going, Mama.”
“You have been here once,” I say.
Nadia looks up at me and says, “Technically twice, because orientation counts.”
“Thank you, my tiny lawyer,” I say.
Nadia nods seriously. “You’re welcome.”
Mila reaches the classroom door and immediately turns back. Her curls have already started escaping the clips I put in this morning. Five minutes of effort, destroyed by enthusiasm.
Her teacher, Miss Elena, smiles at her. “Good morning, Mila.”
Mila says, “Good morning. This is my sister. She’s shy, but only with new people.”
Nadia gasps. “I’m not shy.”
Mila says, “You are sometimes shy.”
Nadia says, “I’m observing.”
Miss Elena crouches slightly and says, “Observation is very important.”
Nadia relaxes at once. “Yes, it is.”
I stand there holding two lunch bags I no longer need to hold and try not to fall apart.
Miss Elena looks at me kindly. “They’ll be all right, Ms. Hart.”
I nod too quickly. “Yes. I know. They’re excited.”
Mila throws both arms around my waist with enough force to knock the breath out of me. “Don’t be sad, Mama.”
“I’m not sad,” I say.
Nadia studies my face. “You’re wearing your crying glasses.”
“They’re regular sunglasses,” I say.
Nadia says, “No, they’re the crying ones.”
Mila pats my cardigan. “We’ll come back after school.”
“That’s usually how school works,” I say, and my voice only cracks a little.
Nadia steps closer and presses her face into my side. She’s less dramatic than Mila in public, but her fingers tighten in my cardigan, and that tells me everything.
I bend and kiss the top of her head. “Be brave, sweetheart.”
Nadia says, “I’m already brave.”
“I know,” I say.
Mila lifts her face for a kiss. “Me too.”
“You too,” I say, kissing her cheek. “Very brave. Very loud. Very likely to reorganize the classroom by lunch.”
Mila grins. “Maybe.”
Miss Elena laughs softly. “We’ll manage.”
I hand over the lunch bags because if I keep holding them, I might accidentally take the girls home and homeschool them badly for the next twelve years.
“Bye, Mama,” Mila says.
“Bye, Mama,” Nadia says, quieter.
I wave once. “Bye, my loves.”
They walk inside. Mila goes first, already talking to another little girl near the cubbies. Nadia pauses at the doorway, turns back, and gives me one last small wave.
I wave back with a smile so forced my cheeks hurt.
Then the classroom door closes halfway, and they’re inside a world that does not need me every second.
I make it to the car before the tears come properly. The second I shut the door, I press both hands to my face and breathe out a sound that is almost a laugh and almost a sob.
“Very elegant,” I whisper to myself. “Very mature.”
My phone buzzes in my bag.
I pull it out, expecting Karina.
Karina: Did you cry?
I sniff and type back: No.
Karina: Zoya.
Me: A dignified amount.
Karina: There is no dignified amount. There is only crying and lying.
Me: Fine. I cried.
Karina: Good. That means you love them and are not a robot. Breakfast?
Me: Give me ten minutes.
Karina: You get five. If I leave you alone too long, you’ll start looking at baby photos in the parking lot.
I look at the school entrance again. She knows me too well.
I type back: I would never.
Karina: You did it during dentist day.
Me: That was medically stressful.
Karina: Breakfast, Zoya.
I smile through the leftover tears and lock the phone. Then, because apparently I enjoy hurting myself, I unlock it again.
I don’t mean to scroll to the thread. That’s what I tell myself every time. My thumb simply knows the way now, past the school group chat, past Karina, past my mother’s messages about whether the girls wore socks, past reminders from the dentist and the library where I work part-time now.
Unknown Number.
No name. No photograph. No clue. Just a number I should have deleted six years ago.
I stare at it with the tired embarrassment of a woman who has grown older but not necessarily wiser.
Six years. For six years, I have kept this number.
I don’t know his name. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t know if the voice in my head sounds anything like his real one. Back then, before the library, before Ruslan, before blood in a hallway and a pregnancy test, he was just a stranger Karina dared me to text.
A wrong number. A mistake. A private, reckless thread that became flirtation, then heat, then something I used to open when loneliness made me stupid.
I should have stopped after I left Ruslan’s house.
I didn’t.
Pregnancy made everything worse. My body belonged to the twins before they even had names.
I was tired all the time and hungry in strange ways and furious at the smell of onions.
I cried over a detergent commercial once and then yelled at Karina for laughing because, according to me, the socks in the commercial had “finally found a family.”
Karina had said, “Zoya, I love you, but the socks are actors.”
I had cried harder.
The desire was worse than the crying. No one warns you properly about that. People talk about nausea and swollen feet and back pain. They don’t say that some nights you will lie awake, enormous and aching and lonely, with your skin too sensitive and your mind going places it should not go.
I thought of Ruslan often then.
I hated myself for it.
I thought of his hands, his mouth, his voice against my ear. I thought of his room by the sea and the way he looked at me like wanting me was not a problem he intended to apologize for.
Those memories hurt too much. So sometimes, I texted the unknown number instead.
He was easier. Faceless. Separate.
A voice in the dark that had no blood on his shirt, no men with guns around him, no power to send me away “for my safety” like I was a problem to solve before morning.
At first, my messages were careful.
Me: Are you awake?
Unknown Number: Yes.
Me: I can’t sleep.
Unknown Number: Why?
Me: Pregnancy is a horror movie.
Unknown Number: You’re pregnant?
I stared at that question for a long time. Then I typed back: Yes.
He didn’t reply for twelve minutes. I remember because I counted every one of them.
Unknown Number: Are you safe?
The question made me cry.
Me: Yes.
It wasn’t completely true, but it was true enough.
After that, I texted him too many times. Sometimes because I was scared. Sometimes because I was embarrassed by how badly I wanted to be touched. Sometimes because I needed release and couldn’t bear the weight of my own thoughts without somewhere to put them.
I never gave him details that could identify me. No full name. No address. No photos. No mention of Ruslan. I was lonely, not reckless enough to hand my life to a stranger.
He answered less as time passed. Sometimes he said nothing for weeks. Sometimes he wrote one sentence that made my whole body remember the woman I had been before the girls made me into someone new.
Unknown Number: Tell me what you need.
Unknown Number: Take your time.
Unknown Number: Breathe first.
Once, after the twins were born and I was awake at three in the morning with both girls crying and milk leaking through my shirt, I wrote to him without thinking.
Me: I miss being touched like a woman instead of needed like furniture.
I regretted it immediately.
He answered the next day.
Unknown: You are still a woman.
I sat on the bathroom floor and cried silently while Mila slept in a sling against my chest and Nadia hiccupped in the bassinet.
That was the problem with the unknown number. He wasn’t real enough to hurt me properly. He was real enough to make me feel less alone.
Now I sit in the kindergarten parking lot while my daughters begin their first day of school, and I look at the empty message box like a fool.
I type: First day of kindergarten. They were brave. I was not.
My thumb rests above the keyboard.
I don’t send it.
The girls are not something I share with him.
Not really. They’re mine. Their gap-toothed smiles, their dramatic breakfast opinions, their bedtime negotiations, their matching birthmarks near their left shoulders, their habit of crawling into my bed during storms and claiming they are “checking on me.”
They are my whole life.
They are also Ruslan’s, though he doesn’t know it.
That thought comes with the old ache, familiar now but still sharp if I press it too hard.
I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if he ever looked for me.
For the first year, I half expected to see a black car outside every apartment I rented. Every time someone knocked unexpectedly, my heart jumped. Every time a man with dark hair passed too close on the street, my body remembered before my mind did.
No one came.
Eventually, waiting became humiliating, so I stopped calling it waiting. I called it survival. Then motherhood.
Then life.
The school bell rings somewhere inside the building. Children’s voices rise faintly beyond the doors.
I look up in time to see Mila at the classroom window. She presses both hands against the glass and mouths something with great seriousness. I laugh because I can read her face perfectly.
She’s saying, “Mama, look!”
Nadia appears beside her and tugs at Mila’s sleeve, probably telling her windows are not for dramatic public announcements.
Mila ignores her and waves harder.
I lift my hand. “I see you,” I whisper, though they cannot hear me.