Chapter 1 #2
Yulya picked up her children from their babysitter’s apartment at six o’clock, as she always did.
She worked as a secretary for an attorney in a highly respectable law firm.
Pavlo, her son, was eleven, and her daughter, Daryna, was seven.
The babysitter picked them up from school every day.
Yulya’s husband, Symon, was a teacher at a different school.
He taught math and science to older students, and tutored some of the students at the ballet school.
Yulya was thirty-four and Symon thirty-seven.
They fell in love at university, married when Yulya graduated, twelve years before, and were happily married now.
Her parents lived in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv.
Her father was an architect, her mother an artist. Symon’s father was the manager of a bank, and his mother stayed home.
They lived in Kharkiv. Yulya’s brother, Olek, lived in Warsaw with his wife, Nina, and their two teenage sons, Bogdan and Tomas.
Nina was Polish, and Olek had a good job at an ad agency.
Nina was an editor at a publishing house and their two noisy teenage boys were thirteen and fifteen.
Pavlo loved playing with his cousins when they came to visit, or their family went to Warsaw.
Symon and Yulya lived in a pleasant, peaceful residential neighborhood, and with both their salaries, they were able to afford a very nice apartment.
The children had their own rooms. Their dog, Max, bounded out to see them the moment Yulya unlocked the door, and Pavlo took him for a walk while Daryna took her coat off.
While Yulya started dinner, Daryna set the table, and when Pavlo came back with Max, his mother reminded him to start his homework.
Daryna did hers at the babysitter’s. Pavlo liked to do his at home, at his desk on his computer.
He was a good student. Max was a ball of black fluff.
They had found him abandoned near a frozen lake in winter, shivering in the cold.
They had brought him home, saved him, warmed him up, and they all loved him.
He slept with Pavlo at night, and loved to hide under the covers.
Symon tutored students after school every day, and came home in time for dinner.
He was also one of the official tutors for the ballet school, in the early morning hours before he went to the school where he taught.
There were a number of tutors. Daryna put her arms around her father and kissed him as soon as he walked in, and showed him the drawings she had made that day.
Yulya thought she might have inherited her grandmother’s artistic talent.
Pavlo loved to play soccer with his friends on the weekends, and sometimes with his father, who played on a team himself and coached soccer at school.
After dinner, Yulya cleaned up the kitchen, and then went to sit by the fire with Symon.
They put the children to bed every night and said prayers with them.
Yulya loved their life. It was everything she had dreamed of as a young girl, and Symon was the love of her life.
They wanted another baby and thought that in another year they could afford it.
Their life had gone according to plan so far.
They felt very lucky, and their family meant everything to both of them.
—
Yulya’s parents, Petro and Oxana, lived a few miles away, in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, in the same apartment they had lived in since their children had grown up.
Before that, they had had a house in the same neighborhood.
Their apartment was on the ground floor and had a beautiful garden.
Oxana loved her garden. She was seventy-three years old and had been an artist all her life, commercially when she was younger, and now for her own pleasure.
Petro, at seventy-nine, was a retired architect.
They loved living near their daughter and her family, and sometimes babysat for their grandchildren on weekends so Yulya and Symon could have a date night and go out for dinner.
Daryna and Pavlo loved playing in their grandmother’s art studio.
—
Oxana and Petro were healthy and strong and felt lucky to have good health, each other, and family nearby.
They had been married for fifty-two years and were never apart.
Yulya had come along as a surprise ten years after Olek, and they were very close.
Petro and Oxana were looking forward to seeing their grandchildren that weekend.
They loved going to the ballet and concerts, and having friends over for dinner.
They were both wonderful cooks, and enjoyed cooking together, especially since they were retired now.
They were always together, and never tired of each other.
When they were younger, Petro had written poetry to Oxana, and she had all his poems saved in an antique wooden box.
She treasured the love poems he had written her and still read them sometimes.
She knew most of them by heart. Petro was the love of her life.
—
Sasha had just delivered a baby, and the mother and baby boy were settled in a room with the proud father.
Sasha had finished entering all the pertinent information about the delivery into the patient’s chart on the main computer at the hospital where she practiced in Kyiv when Anton stopped by to see her.
It was midnight and he had just gotten out of surgery.
They both worked late nights. Sasha was an obstetrician, thirty-nine years old, and Anton was a surgeon and head of the trauma and emergency department.
He was forty-eight years old, and they had been lovers for just over a year.
They had gone to considerable effort to keep anyone at the hospital from finding out, and had been successful so far.
Anton had been married for twenty-six years, and his son, Danilo, was in medical school in Madrid.
He was twenty-five years old. Sasha had never been married, and said she worked too hard to get married.
She didn’t have time for a husband and children.
She loved her work, and was a skilled obstetrician, with a subspecialty in pediatrics.
Her father and grandfather had been doctors, her mother a nurse.
Her family was deceased now, and Sasha didn’t mind working holidays and weekends.
Anton did the same, in order to escape an unhappy marriage.
His wife, Iryna, was forty-seven, and had been dissatisfied all her life.
She had thought that marrying a doctor would mean a life of luxury, a fancier lifestyle, and exotic foreign travel.
Instead she was married to a man who preferred his work to a home life with her.
Her beauty had faded fast, tainted by bitterness.
They had a nice home and he indulged her, but she always wanted more than they had.
She knew Anton had had affairs, and so had she, but they stayed married.
Divorce seemed too big a step to both of them.
It was easier to stay under one roof and lead separate lives.
It was a choice they had made long since.
Meeting Sasha had changed Anton’s life. She was warm, happy, natural, modest, undemanding, and beautiful.
She made him feel happy and laugh whenever he was with her.
He couldn’t get enough of her. She was everything he had never had with Iryna, and wanted more of with Sasha.
Marriage had never been discussed, they made do with what they had.
She accepted the fact that he was married and never complained about it.
She was grateful for the time they had together.
The present they shared was enough without worrying about the future.
Anton spent the night with Sasha occasionally in her small apartment in a plain building near the hospital, and in the morning he would tell Iryna he had stayed at the hospital to be near a critically ill patent in the ICU after surgery.
His explanations were unnecessary. She didn’t ask.
Whether his stories were true or not no longer mattered to her.
The fire had gone out in her years before, and the passion and warmth out of their relationship.
She wasn’t looking for love, she wanted a better life, and she hated being stuck in Ukraine.
She had always felt destined for better things.
Anton didn’t share that desire. He loved his work and his son. And Sasha. For him, that was enough.
Iryna’s parents had lived modestly, and she felt trapped in the wrong life. She wanted glamour and sophistication and fun and dreamed of vacations in the south of France, but instead they went to Croatia on vacation, or Odesa in Ukraine.