38. Cara
CARA
Mikhail puts the red car on Dmitri’s knee and the blue car on mine.
“Blue has to rest,” he says, patting the scratched roof with one finger. “Blue had a hard race.”
Dmitri sits on the nursery rug with one leg bent, his big hand resting near the track Mikhail has built from books, blocks, and one upside-down slipper. He looks strange there, all black clothes and bruised knuckles, letting a four-year-old decide road rules.
Mikhail is in his dinosaur pajamas, inside out because he’d had opinions after bath time and Kathryn had chosen survival over principle. A stegosaurus seam now runs down his stomach.
“Red can guard,” Dmitri says, moving the car beside mine.
Mikhail laughs. “Cars don’t guard. Cars race.”
Dmitri glances at me.
He keeps doing that. Every few seconds, his eyes find my face, checking for a nod, a smile, any sign that I’m inside my own skin and not somewhere back at the hotel.
I try to smile back, but my face won’t move. My head feels packed too tight, pressure building behind my eyes. Patrick is on the floor again every time I blink. Eyes open. Mouth red. Hand reaching for a deal, for a phone, for me, for anything that would keep him alive another minute.
Mikhail makes an engine sound and bumps red into a wooden block.
Dmitri plays along, but his gaze cuts back to me.
I stand before I know I am going to.
Mikhail looks up. “Where’s Mama going?”
Dmitri doesn’t reach for me. “Mama needs a minute,” he says, picking up the red car with care. “We’ll keep the race ready for her.”
Mikhail accepts that because Dmitri says it calmly.
I leave the nursery before my son can ask a harder question. No one stops me in the corridor. A guard turns his head once, then steps back. Dmitri must have told them, or maybe they can all see that I’m not running.
My feet carry me out past the nursery corridor and down the covered path toward the garden. I walk past bare trees, iron lanterns, and snow gathered along the gravel. The estate sits quiet around me, tucked deep in the woods, with guards posted at corners I pretend not to see.
I enter the winter glasshouse. The garden smells faintly of wet earth, old leaves, and the small orange trees someone has coaxed into surviving under glass.
At the far end sits a wooden gazebo. The little garden pavilion looks built for summer tea, but winter has claimed it.
Frost clouds the lower panes. A few dry leaves sit trapped in the corners.
I sit there with my coat around me and take out my phone.
My hands shake when I open the photos. The first one that catches me is ridiculous.
Patrick at fourteen, grinning with a missing front tooth after he tried to jump a bike over our father’s toolbox. I am beside him, ten years old and furious, holding a bag of frozen peas to his mouth while Mom laughs so hard she has one hand against the kitchen counter.
I swipe.
Dad in a paper birthday crown. Mom holding a cake with one side sagging because Patrick and I stole frosting before dinner. Patrick’s arm around my neck, pulling me in close while I pretend to hate him. My face is pink from laughing.
Another swipe.
A beach day in Boston. Wind in Mom’s hair. Dad asleep under a towel. Patrick holding my sandals over his head while I chase him across wet sand, both of us skinny, sunburned, and sure the world owed us nothing worse than homework.
My breath breaks.
I press my fist against my mouth. No kind words come. I don’t have good words for what he became. Nothing rises for my parents either. They’re faces in the pictures and ghosts in my chest, people who loved badly, missed too much, and left us to build our own rules out of fear, charm, and damage.
But Patrick was my brother.
Before the money, before the lies, before the way ambition grew in him without enough talent or decency to carry it, he was the boy who taught me to climb out the kitchen window when we wanted ice cream after bedtime.
He was the boy who put a blanket over me during storms and then denied it in the morning.
He was the first person who knew how to make me laugh until I couldn’t breathe.
I loved him very much. A sound comes out of me, small and broken. Then another. I bend over the phone and cry into my hands. I don’t have a big speech. No clean ending. Just grief coming through in unruly waves while snow presses against the glass and orange leaves shine under the lamps.
After a while, footsteps stop outside the gazebo. Dmitri.
I wipe my face with my sleeve. “Is Mikhail asleep?”
Dmitri stands beyond the carved rail, hands open at his sides. “Kathryn is with him. He’s listening to a story now.” He pulls out a folded handkerchief from his coat pocket and holds it out.
I nod and take it, then turn my face away. “I don’t want to hold him right now,” I say into the clean white cloth pressed against my mouth. “Does that make me a bad mother?”
Dmitri’s face changes. He kneels beside me and places his big hand on my shoulder. “No, it doesn’t.”
“It should,” I say, staring at the phone in my lap.
“No.” His voice is gentle.
It almost ruins me.
“I look at him and I see what Patrick used,” I whisper, closing my hand over the phone. “Then I hate myself for thinking that because Mikhail is mine. He’s innocent. He’s everything.”
Dmitri crouches in front of me, careful, giving me the choice to pull away.
“You’re allowed to be in shock,” he says, his voice low. “You’re allowed to hate your brother and miss him in the same breath.”
My eyes burn again. “He wasn’t always this.”
Dmitri reaches for my hand, then waits. I give it to him.
His thumb moves over my knuckles, tender and warm. “I know.”
The simple answer hurts because he means it. He knows what it is to have the dead stay young in one memory and ruined in another.
I look down at our joined hands.
Dmitri’s thumb stops over my knuckles. “There’s something I kept.”
He reaches inside his coat slowly. When his hand comes out, dark red silk rests across his palm.
My scarf.
For a second, I’m back in Boston. White sheets. Hotel carpet. His side of the bed empty. The morning after. The stupid, sick certainty that I had imagined softness in a man who had never meant to stay.
I stare at the scarf until it blurs.
“You took it,” I say.
“You left it on the chair,” Dmitri says. “Hotel staff could have found it, and the hallway cameras already had enough. I took it because I didn’t want anyone tying you to me. That was what I told myself.”
His face is bare in a way I have never seen.
My fingers tremble when I touch the silk.
“And after?” I ask.
His throat moves. “After, I kept it because I couldn’t make myself let go.”
The winter garden goes quiet around us. My hand closes over the scarf and his fingers underneath it.