CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nadia — My Mother’s Letter
My darling girl,
If you’re reading this, it means I ran out of time to tell you myself, and I am sorrier for that than for anything else I’ve done.
I’ve written this letter four times over four years, because I keep changing my mind about how much truth a person deserves versus how much truth keeps them safe, and I never do manage to decide.
I hope by the time you find this, you’re old enough, and brave enough, to want the whole of it anyway.
I worked for a bad man for three years before I understood how bad.
By the time I understood, I was already careful — I’d learned, the way you learn in rooms full of men who don’t think you’re listening, that the safest thing a frightened woman can do is become useful in ways no one expects.
I copied everything. Every account, every name, every dollar moved through Meridian that was never supposed to be traceable.
I told myself it was insurance. I think, if I’m honest, it was also something closer to justice, though I’ve never had the courage to call it that out loud.
I didn’t run because I was caught. I ran because I found out I was pregnant with you, and something in me that had been willing to risk my own life for three years discovered it wasn’t willing to risk yours for even one more day.
The drive in this box is everything I took.
I never used it — never sold it, never leveraged it, never even let myself look at it after the first year, because looking at it meant remembering how close I’d come to losing everything trying to protect you before you were even born.
I kept it because a woman who’s been that afraid never quite believes the danger is finished, and I was right not to believe it, wasn’t I.
If you’re reading this, it means I was right.
There is a name in these files you need to know before anyone else tells it to you first. Dimitri Sorokin has a son.
I’ve watched him from a distance the way you watch a storm you’re not sure will turn toward you — Kael, seventeen the last I checked, being groomed for a life I hope with everything in me he manages to refuse.
If he ever comes looking for you, I don’t know whether it will be to finish what his father started or to try, in whatever broken way the sons of men like that try, to undo it.
I can’t tell you which. I can only tell you to trust your own judgment over his name, because a name is not a sentence, however much the world wants you to believe it is.
I love you more than every dangerous thing I ever did to keep you safe.
Whatever you decide to do with what’s in this box — burn it, use it, hand it to the police, forget it exists — know that I never once regretted any of it, because it bought you a life I got to watch you start, even if I didn’t get to watch you finish it.
Be brave the way I was. Be braver than that, if you can manage it.
All my love, always — Mom
I read it three times before I could speak, and Kael, beside me in a car that had stopped moving somewhere along the way without my noticing, said nothing at all — just let me have the silence for as long as I needed it, which turned out to be longer than either of us expected.
“She knew about you,” I said finally. “She wrote about you before either of us had ever met. Before your father died. She was already wondering what you’d become.”
“What does she say.”
I read him the line about the storm, about not knowing whether he’d come to finish what his father started or undo it, and watched something in his face crack open in a way I hadn’t seen since the storage unit — grief, I realized, for a woman he’d never met, who’d spent her last years afraid of exactly the shape he’d eventually grow into.
“She was right to wonder,” he said quietly. “I wondered the same thing about myself for longer than I’d like to admit.”