CHAPTER NINE
Nadia — The Space Between Two Truths
I don’t remember deciding to walk away from him.
I remember the cold air outside the storage unit turning into the cold air of my own street, six blocks later, with no memory of the walk between, like my body had taken over the job of moving me somewhere safe while my mind stayed behind to keep turning his last sentence over and over.
Dimitri Sorokin was my father.
I sat on my kitchen floor — I was becoming a person who sat on floors, apparently, some new low center of gravity my life had developed in the last two weeks — and tried to make the sentence mean something manageable.
It refused. Every version I built collapsed under its own weight.
The man who’d matched his footsteps to mine on a dark street to keep me safe was the son of the man my mother had spent nine years running from.
The man who’d stood between me and Vane’s watcher in a grocery store carried, somewhere in him, whatever made his father the kind of man a woman had to disappear from.
I didn’t sleep. Around four in the morning I gave up pretending I would and called Priya, who answered on the first ring, which told me she hadn’t been sleeping either — she’d been waiting by the phone since I’d texted her three panicked sentences after leaving Solano’s and gone quiet for six hours after.
“Tell me everything,” she said, and I did, start to finish, my mother’s stolen name and Sorokin’s money and the storage unit and the man whose face I now had, finally, fully, and hated myself a little for how it hadn’t stopped my pulse from doing something complicated the moment I’d seen it clearly for the first time.
“So he’s been in love with you,” Priya said slowly, when I finished, “for four years, from a distance, because of some tangled guilt thing about his father and your mom, and he never once thought to just — I don’t know — tell you any of this before you had to find it out from the actual criminal?”
“He said he was protecting me.”
“By keeping you in the dark? Nadia, that’s not protection, that’s—” She stopped herself, and I heard her breathe out slowly on the other end, recalibrating.
“Okay. I’m not going to tell you how to feel about this.
I just need you to hear yourself. You’re defending him four hours after finding out he’s been watching you sleep for four years and lied to your face about who he is. ”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Do you? Because it sounds like you’re already halfway to forgiving him, and I don’t think you’ve even let yourself be angry yet.”
She wasn’t wrong, and that was the part that scared me most — not what Kael had done, but how much of my own reaction I couldn’t fully account for.
I’d spent two weeks afraid of a presence in the dark, and now that the presence had a face and a name and a devastating, complicated reason for existing in my life at all, some part of me that I didn’t like very much had already started building a case for him instead of against him.
I went back to the storage unit the next evening. I told myself it was for information, that I needed the rest of the story and he was the only one willing to give it to me on my terms instead of Vane’s. I’m not sure that was the whole truth even as I told it to myself.
He was there, like he’d been waiting, which of course he had — four years of waiting for me in one form or another, apparently, though I still didn’t fully know what that meant.
“I’m not here to forgive you,” I said, before he could say anything, because I needed that boundary in place before I let myself get any closer to him.
“I’m here because you owe me the entire story, not the version that makes you look like a tragic hero standing guard over something you feel guilty about. ”
“That’s fair,” he said, and something in his voice — steady, careful, none of the smooth performance Vane wrapped around every sentence — made me believe, despite every reason not to, that he meant it.
“Then start with your father. All of it. And don’t leave anything out because you think it’ll change how I look at you. I already know how I look at you. I want to know if I’m wrong to.”
He was quiet for a long moment, the kind of quiet that told me he was deciding how much of himself he was finally willing to put in front of me, unguarded, after four years of choosing distance over exposure every single time.
“Sit down,” he said finally. “It’s not a short story, and none of it makes me look good.”
I sat. Some part of me — the part that painted water because it never held still, the part that had spent my whole life needing to understand the thing that frightened me before I could decide how afraid to actually be — understood, even then, that I wasn’t just there for the story.
I was there because I wanted, God help me, to know him. All of him. Even the parts that had made me afraid before I had a face to put to the fear.