25. Zoya
ZOYA
The cottage has exactly three useful food items by the second morning: salt, tea bags, and a jar of something that expired during a previous government. So naturally, I end up in a grocery store with my children and a man who was shot three days ago.
The grocery store is twenty minutes away in a neighboring town, far enough that I tell myself this is safe, normal, practical. We need milk, bread, fruit, painkillers, proper bandages, something for the girls that isn’t stale crackers, and coffee before I start threatening the furniture.
Ruslan insists on coming.
I say absolutely not.
He says if he’s going to hide in a cottage with no security and no clear line to his people, then he’s not letting me walk into a public place alone with the girls.
I tell him he can barely walk.
Ruslan looks me over as I get out of the car and says, “You look ridiculous.”
I glare at him over the oversized black sunglasses that take up half my face. “That’s the point.”
He shuts the car door and takes in the rest of me: floppy sun hat, loose cardigan, long skirt, and the most forgettable shoes I own.
“You look like you’re hiding from paparazzi in 2007,” he says.
“I am hiding,” I say.
“You think the hat helps?”
“The hat absolutely helps.”
Mila appears beside me holding the edge of my cardigan. “Mama, you look glamorous.”
I point at her. “Thank you.”
Nadia gets out on the other side and adjusts her own little cap with deep seriousness. “You look suspicious.”
I point at her too. “Less helpful.”
Nadia shrugs. “I’m not here to flatter. I’m here to observe.”
Ruslan shuts the trunk with one hand and looks entirely too normal for a man being hunted by his own people. Dark shirt, jeans, cap pulled low, no limp unless he forgets himself.
I say, “You should be wearing a hat too.”
He starts walking toward the entrance. “Nobody is going to recognize me.”
I hurry after him with the girls. “That’s exactly what famous criminals say before becoming news.”
He glances at me. “I’m not exactly a wanted man.”
“No, that would make things simpler.”
Mila slips her hand into his without asking.
He looks down at it. Then at her.
Then keeps walking.
I look away before the sight can do something to my chest.
Inside, the grocery store is bright, overcooled, and offensively normal. Fluorescent lights. Shopping carts with one bad wheel. A bakery smell strong enough to make Mila gasp like she’s entered a holy place.
We get a cart. Ruslan puts a hand on the handle before I can, and I stop.
“You are not pushing the cart,” I say.
“I am absolutely pushing the cart.”
“You were shot.”
“In the leg.”
“Yes.”
“Not in the hands.”
“It’s not about the hands. It’s about your whole body being attached to the leg.”
Mila looks between us. “Are you fighting about the cart?”
“Yes,” I say.
“No,” Ruslan says.
Nadia says, “You are.”
Ruslan pushes the cart.
I let him, mostly because if I continue to fight him, we’ll still be in produce at sunset.
The girls run the operation like tiny generals. Mila wants everything colorful. Nadia wants everything sensible. Mila throws a mango into the cart because it “looks promising.”
At the cereal aisle, Mila finds rainbow marshmallows and clutches the box to her chest. “Emergency food.”
“No,” I say.
“Yes,” she says.
“No.”
Nadia takes the box from her and reads the nutrition panel. “This is barely food.”
Mila gasps. “That is rude.”
“It’s also correct.”
Ruslan says, “How do you both talk this much before dinner?”
I say, “Practice.”
He gives me a look. “I can tell.”
We make it to dairy without anyone crying, which counts as a victory. I’m reaching for milk when a woman beside us smiles and says, “Oh, your girls are adorable.”
I turn automatically. “Thank you.”
“Before you ask, yes, we’re twins,” Nadia says seriously.
The woman chuckles and looks at Ruslan, then at me, then back at the girls with the easy confidence of someone who has already decided the shape of our lives.
“You’ve got your hands full,” she tells him.
I open my mouth.
Ruslan, bastard that he is, says nothing.
The woman keeps smiling. “And they look so much like their father.”
Time stops.
Mila is busy trying to reach the cereal shelf. Nadia is reading ingredients.
The woman is still smiling.
I drop the packet of pasta I’m holding. Ruslan crouches first despite the leg, gets the pasta, and when he straightens, he’s looking at me.
The woman is still talking, entirely unaware she has just detonated my nervous system in aisle seven. “They have his eyes,” she says to me cheerfully, nodding at Ruslan. “Especially the quieter one.”
Nadia looks up at that. “I’m not the quieter one. I’m the more selective one.”
The woman laughs. “Well, selective then.”
Mila says, “I have Mama’s mouth.”
The woman says, “You do, sweetheart.”
Ruslan is not listening to her anymore. He’s looking at Mila. Then Nadia. Then back at me. Something changes in his face.
His gaze moves over the girls again, slower now.
Mila’s eyes.
Nadia’s mouth.
The line of Nadia’s jaw when she’s stubborn.
The dark curls.
My heart begins to pound so hard I feel sick.
The woman pats my arm, still smiling. “Lovely family.”
I make some sound that might be a laugh if heard through three walls.
She moves on with her basket.
I stand there in my ridiculous hat, one hand still on the cart, while my daughters continue debating cereal as if their whole existence has not just been placed under fluorescent grocery lighting and named out loud by a stranger.
Ruslan says my name. Just that.
“Zoya.”
It’s low. Careful.
I turn to him because I have to.
There’s nothing soft in his expression. Nothing confused either.
He understands. He finally understands.
Mila tugs at my sleeve. “Mama, can we get the tiger cereal if we also get boring flakes?”
Nadia says, “They are not boring. You’re just a weirdo whose teeth will all fall out by the time you’re seven.”
Mila sticks her tongue out in response.
I stare at them for one stupid second, because they are still just children in a grocery store. They are not revelations. They are not plot twists. They are my girls arguing about cereal.
And yet everything has changed.
I look back at Ruslan. He’s still watching me. The weight of what he knows now sits between us, huge and silent and impossible to move in public.
So I do the only thing I can. I reach for the cereal. “One box each,” I tell the girls. They both cheer together.
Ruslan is still looking at me when I put both boxes into the cart.
He says nothing else. He doesn’t need to.
Now he knows.
I make it to checkout without saying anything stupid. That, under the circumstances, feels like a miracle.
Mila is still talking about cereal. Nadia is still objecting to the tiger on nutritional grounds. Ruslan says nothing at all, which is worse than if he had asked me directly, because now every second of silence feels like a question.
At the register, Mila insists on helping unload the cart.
The cashier smiles at her and says, “Big helper.”
Mila nods. “I’m carrying the snacks emotionally.”
Nadia says, “That doesn’t reduce physical labor.”
The cashier laughs.
I force a smile.
Ruslan stands beside the cart, one hand on the handle, watching me in that still way of his. He isn’t angry yet. Not openly. He’s thinking. Putting things together. Reordering the last six years in his head.
The girls. The timing. My face when that woman said they looked like him.
He knows.
By the time we get back to the cottage, I’m so tense my shoulders hurt.
The girls run inside first because Mila wants to name the cereal boxes and Nadia wants to stop her before it becomes permanent. I carry two bags. Ruslan takes the heavier ones despite his leg, which annoys me because I want to be angry and he’s still being useful.
The front door shuts behind us.
The girls disappear into the kitchen.
Only then does he speak. “How old are they?”
I set the bags down too hard on the counter. “Ruslan.”
“How old?”
I turn around. His face is calm. His eyes are not.
“They’re five,” I say.
He nods once.
The math happens behind his eyes again, but he already did it in the grocery store. This is not about the number. It’s about hearing me say it.
“You knew,” he says.
“No,” I say. “You understood.”
“That’s not an answer.”
My temper flares immediately. “Then ask a better question.”
Something hard moves across his face. “Are they mine?”
The words land like a slap.
I glance toward the kitchen. I can hear Mila opening cupboard doors she was absolutely told not to open. Nadia is correcting her in a harsh whisper.
I lower my voice. “Not here.”
“Where, then?”
“Somewhere my daughters can’t hear.”
He takes one slow step closer. “My daughters?”
I hate how low he says it. I hate that the words sound right in his mouth.
I hate that some part of me has imagined this moment and still wasn’t ready for it.
“Yes,” I say quietly. “Your daughters.”
His whole body stills.
For one second, all the anger goes out of him. There’s only the fact itself. Then it comes back in a different form.
“You left without telling me.”
I laugh once, short and sharp. “I left? That’s your version?”
“You were pregnant.”
“You sent me away.”
His jaw tightens. “Because I thought it was over.”
“It wasn’t your decision to make.”
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.”
There it is again. That honesty that should help and doesn’t.
I step toward him before I can stop myself. “You don’t get to stand here and act wounded that I didn’t hand you the truth after you threw me out like a loose end.”
His voice stays low. “I threw you out to keep you alive.”
“You don’t get points for intent.”
“I might if it worked.”
The cruelty of that makes me stare.
Then I say, quieter and more dangerous, “Do not ever say that to me.”
He hears it. Good.
In the kitchen, Mila calls, “Mama, Nadia is hiding the good spoons!”
I close my eyes for one second and answer, “No one is hiding spoons.”
Nadia calls back, “I’m organizing them.”
I turn back to Ruslan. “This is what I mean. This is my life. I can’t do this with you in the same voice I use for them.”
He looks past me, toward the kitchen, then back at me. “You should have told me.”
I let out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “When? Tell me when. After you told me to leave? After I took the test alone? After I saw two heartbeats and realized my entire life had just split in half? Which moment sounds best to you?”
His face changes at that.
I keep going because I can’t stop now. “You don’t know anything about what came after.
You don’t know how sick I was. You don’t know how terrified I was.
You don’t know how many lies I had to tell just to make it through the first year.
I was trying to keep them safe, and I didn’t trust you to be the sort of man who makes safety simpler. ”
His eyes stay on mine. “Was I wrong?”
The question catches me off guard.
I look at his leg. The bandage. The limp. The men in masks. The apartment I can’t go back to.
“No,” I say.
The truth of it hurts both of us.
Mila appears at the kitchen doorway with a cereal box in her hands. “Are you fighting?”
We both look at her. Children always know.
“No,” I say too quickly.
Mila narrows her eyes. “You have fighting faces.”
Nadia appears behind her, already suspicious. “You’re both speaking in your careful voices.”
Ruslan says, “Your mother and I are discussing timing.”
Nadia thinks about that. “That sounds like fighting.”
“It often is,” I say.
Mila hugs the cereal box to her chest. “Can we still have lunch?”
I stare at her for one long second. Then I laugh because if I don’t, I will either cry or scream. “Yes,” I say. “You can still have lunch.”
The girls disappear again.
Ruslan looks at me. “You should have let me know.”
I feel the anger come back cleanly this time. “And you should have not been the sort of man I had to protect children from.”
He flinches.
Actually flinches.
Good. Because I’m tired of being the only one cut open by memory.
He says, “I was trying to protect you from my world.”
“And I was trying to protect them from you.”
The words sit there. Ugly. True enough to wound.
He looks away first.
The silence after that is worse than the argument.
I start putting groceries away because I need my hands to do something. Milk in the cooler box. Bread on the counter. Fruit in the bowl by the window.
Behind me, he says, “I would have come.”
I stop. I don’t turn around.
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I do.”
“No,” I say, still not looking at him. “You know the version of yourself you want to be in this conversation.”
When I finally turn, his face is closed.
Not cold. Not indifferent.
Controlled.
That’s almost harder to fight.
He picks up the painkillers from the grocery bag and sets them on the counter like he’s doing something useful because if he reaches for me, we will start again.
“Fine,” he says.
I hate that word in his mouth. It sounds like a locked door.
The girls come back before either of us can do more damage.
Mila wants to know which cereal gets opened first. Nadia wants to know whether lunch can now be called dinner because of the time. I answer them. Ruslan says nothing. We move through the rest of the afternoon like people in a room where a glass has shattered but no one has swept it up yet.
By evening, the girls are tired and overbright in that way children get after too much disruption. I get them fed. Washed. Into pajamas. Into bed.
Ruslan stays out of my way.
When the cottage finally goes quiet, I sit at the edge of the sofa and rub my eyes. “I need to go back,” I say.
“To the apartment?” he asks.
“Not tonight. But I need clothes. School things. My work setup. Their medicine.”
“I’ll send someone.”
I laugh without humor. “No.”
“I’m not going myself.”
“No,” I say again. “No one from your life is touching my daughters’ toothbrushes.”
His mouth tightens, but he doesn’t argue.
That’s new.
Or maybe I just never saw him forced to choose silence before.
I stand. “I’m going to shower,” I say.
He nods.
I get halfway to the hall before he says my name.
I stop but don’t turn around.
“I did let you go,” he says quietly. “That part is true.”
I look back then. He’s sitting in the chair by the window, one hand on his injured leg, his face older than it used to be.
“I know,” I say.
“And you never really left.”
For one second, I can’t answer. Then I say the only thing I can.
“No,” I say. “I guess I didn’t.”
I leave before he can say anything else. Because if I stay, the fight will start again.
Or worse, it won’t.
And right now, I don’t know which outcome scares me more.