19. Ruslan #2
Zoya’s mouth tightens slightly. “I’m the mother,” she says. “It’s my job to wake up.”
Mila looks worried now. “Are you mad?”
“I’m not mad that you were kind,” Zoya says. “I’m upset that you came near someone injured without telling me.”
I stare between them in awe. Zoya has to explain everything to her children with nuance. I wonder if this is what it’s like every day.
Nadia nods. “That’s fair.”
Mila nods too, less happily. “Okay.”
Zoya looks at Nadia. “You too.”
Nadia sits straighter. “I maintained distance.”
Zoya turns to me then. The apology comes before I can stop it. “I’m sorry,” she says. “They shouldn’t have been here. I woke up late.”
“They were fine,” I say.
Her expression hardens a little. “That’s not the point.”
“No,” I say. “I suppose not.”
Mila whispers to Nadia, “He says suppose.”
Nadia whispers back, “Adults do.”
Zoya closes her eyes briefly. “Kitchen. Both of you. Wash hands. Then breakfast.”
Mila asks, “Can he have breakfast?”
Zoya says, “He can have breakfast if he stops being a crisis for five minutes.”
Nadia looks at me. “Can you?”
“I can try,” I say.
Nadia nods. “Trying is sometimes acceptable.”
Mila takes her sister’s hand and pulls her toward the kitchen. “Come on. We need to check cereal.”
Nadia says, “Cereal does not need checking.”
“It does if we’re out of the good one.”
Their voices fade into the kitchen.
Zoya and I are left in the living room.
Morning light sits between us. So does the couch. So does last night. So does six years.
She doesn’t look at me for a moment.
Then she says, quieter, “Did they bother you?”
“No.”
“They ask too many questions.”
“They are children.”
“They are my children.”
I hear what she means.
A warning. A wall. A reminder.
I nod once. “I know.”
Her eyes flick to mine.
For half a second, I think she’ll say it. I think she will tell me what I already suspect, what the picture and the faces and the timing have been forcing me to look at since last night.
But she only says, “You should have called me when they came out.”
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
“That is not your decision.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
That seems to stop her for a moment. She looks tired enough to fall where she stands, but she’s still holding herself upright out of habit. Out of motherhood. Out of anger. Out of whatever she had to build after me.
I want to ask how she slept.
I want to ask a hundred things I have no right to ask in her living room while my blood is still in the bandage and her daughters are arguing about cereal in the kitchen.
So I say nothing.
Zoya rubs a hand over her face, then turns toward the kitchen. “Don’t move,” she says.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
She gives my leg a pointed look. “Good. For once, keep making sense.”
Then she leaves.
I sit back against the pillow and listen to her speak to the girls in the kitchen, low and tired and patient. Breakfast is cereal, toast, cut fruit, and a level of negotiation I have not seen outside hostage talks.
Mila wants the pink bowl because “it makes cereal taste happier.” Nadia says bowls do not affect taste, then takes the blue one because “it has better depth.” Zoya makes coffee with one hand and cuts bananas with the other, her hair still loose, her face tired in the morning light.
I sit on the couch with my injured leg stretched out, useless and inconvenient.
Zoya doesn’t look at me unless she has to. She moves around the kitchen like she belongs to every corner of it. The girls talk over each other, and she answers both without missing a step.
“Mama, Nadia took the last big strawberry,” Mila says.
Nadia says, “It wasn’t assigned.”
Zoya puts another strawberry on Mila’s plate. “There. Crisis resolved.”
Mila looks pleased. “Thank you.”
Nadia scowls, clearly displeased.
Zoya points the knife at her mildly. “Eat your breakfast, tiny lawyer.”
Nadia does.
I watch Zoya wipe a drop of milk from the counter with her wrist because her hands are full, and something inside me twists hard.
For six years, I thought I had sent her away.
Cruel, yes. Necessary, I told myself. Better for her, I told myself.
But she was there all along. In my phone.
In the dark. In every message I answered when I should have slept.
In every night I told myself the woman on the other side was only a stranger with a clever mouth and a lonely heart.
I talked to her when she was tired. When she was angry.
When she wanted comfort and refused to call it that.
And the other messages.
The ones I shouldn’t think about with her daughters sitting across from me eating cereal.
The things she asked for.
The things I told her I would do if she were in front of me.
My eyes move to the kitchen table before I can stop them.
For one short, brutal second, I see it too clearly. Zoya on this table, her hair loose under my hand, her mouth open against mine, every year between us burned down to nothing.
Then Mila says, “Why are you staring at Mama’s toast?”
Zoya freezes near the counter.
Nadia glances at me, suspicious. “Do you want toast?”
“No,” I say.
Mila pushes her plate toward me. “You can have some of mine.”
“No,” Zoya says quickly. “He has his own food.”
“I’m not hungry,” I say.
Zoya looks at me then. “You need to eat with the antibiotics.”
“I’ll eat.”
“Good.”
The word is practical. Nothing else.
It shouldn’t feel like being touched.
Karina appears from the hallway half-awake, wearing last night’s clothes and a scowl. “Is there coffee?”
Zoya points to the counter. “Mug is there.”
Karina sees me, stops, and says, “Oh. Still here.”
“Good morning to you too,” I say.
Karina pours coffee. “I reserve good mornings for people who don’t bring gunshot wounds into family apartments.”
Mila says, “Aunt Karina, that is rude.”
Karina looks at her. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Nadia says, “It was also accurate.”
Karina points at Nadia. “Thank you.”
Zoya sighs. “Nobody discuss gunshot wounds during breakfast.”
Everyone goes quiet for three seconds.
Then Mila asks, “Can we discuss pancakes?”
“Yes,” Zoya says. “Pancakes are allowed.”
The conversation turns to pancakes, school, and whether frogs have teeth.
After breakfast, Karina takes the girls to wash up. Their voices disappear down the hall, Nadia explaining that soap must stay on hands for long enough to count, Mila insisting she counts “in sparkle time.”
Zoya stays in the kitchen.
She clears plates slowly, not because she needs to, but because she’s avoiding the conversation.
Finally, she sets a cup in the sink and turns to me. “When can you leave?”
I look at her.
There it is. The question she has been holding since last night.
“I can’t leave yet,” I say.
Her face tightens. “Ruslan.”
“I was betrayed.”
She goes still.
I keep my voice low. “The shooting at the school was not random. My men were split. My shooter knew where I would be. They wanted me there, and I walked right into their trap.”
Her face goes pale in a way I don’t like.
I add, “If I leave now and go back to my own people without knowing who turned, I may lead them here.”
The apartment is quiet except for the girls laughing in the bathroom.
Zoya looks toward the hallway. Then back at me. Her voice is flat. “So what you’re saying is, I rescued you, brought you into my home, and now your enemies might follow.”
I don’t soften it. “Yes.”
Her eyes harden. For a moment, she looks exactly like the woman who survived me.
Then she says, “You should have told me that before breakfast.”
I nod once. “I should have.”