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His feet swing slowly above the void where his mother’s bones laid for eighteen years. He looks like a boy. Not the furious prince who tried to steal my kingdom. Not the anguished son who despises me.

Just a boy who lost his mother all over again.

I make my footsteps heavy so he can hear me coming, same as I used to do in the hallway outside his bedroom when he was small enough to be afraid of the dark.

It’s just me, Kirill.

No monsters.

Just Papa.

He doesn’t acknowledge me at all. Just keeps staring down into the pit. His legs swing in that same slow, absent-minded pattern. Back and forth. Back and forth.

I stop a few feet behind him, hands thrust deep in my pockets. “Kirill,” I say.

He still refuses to look up. The wind snaps that plastic sheeting against the pillar again. Seconds stack on top of each other like bricks in a wall neither of us knows how to tear down.

Then my son speaks. “She asked you to let her die. And you did.”

“Yes,” I say.

Kir’s laugh comes out of him like something foul dredged from a drain. “For eighteen fucking years, you let me believe you were a killer.”

I watch his hands curl into fists against the muddy ground. “Yes,” I say again.

What else can I say? I did exactly what Elena asked. I honored her dying wish and it destroyed my relationship with my son, and I’d do it again if she asked me to.

Every time. Without hesitation.

That’s what love is, isn’t it? Carrying someone else’s pain so they don’t have to? Swallowing the poison yourself so their cup stays clean?

Even when it breaks you.

Even when it breaks everyone around you, too.

Once again, a long silence falls between us. The pigeon that fled a moment ago returns to land on the edge of a concrete barrier. It cocks its head, decides our misery is uninteresting, and leaves.

I wait. I’m good at waiting. I’ve spent eighteen years waiting for this moment, this reckoning, and now that it’s here, I find myself strangely calm. Whatever Kir needs to say, I will stand here and take it.

It’s the least I can do for my boy.

Finally, Kir speaks again, so quietly that the wind nearly steals it before it reaches me. “I don’t know how to stop hating you, Papa.”

I say nothing yet.

“I’ve hated you for so long,” he says. “It’s the only thing that made sense. And now, you’re telling me it was all… nothing.”

My ruined knee protests as I lower myself to the ground beside him. The mud soaks through my trousers immediately and the cold seeps into my bones like it’s been waiting here for me all along, as patient as death.

I sit shoulder to shoulder with my son on the edge of his mother’s empty grave. I don’t reach for him. If I did, he’d flinch away, and that flinch would gut me worse than anything he could say. So I just sit close enough that our shoulders brush andhe can feel the heat of another body beside him. Close enough that he knows—even if he can’t accept it yet—that he’s not alone. He never has been.

“You don’t have to stop tonight,” I say. “You don’t have to forgive me tomorrow, or next week, or ever. I’m not asking for that.”

Kir turns to look at me. Everyone has always said he and I look alike, but it’s his mother’s nose he has, thin and proud.

“Then what are you here for?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Nothing. I’m not asking for anything, Kirill. I’m just telling you that I’m not going anywhere.” I gesture at the pit. “Your mother is gone. She’s been gone for eighteen years. But I’m still here. And whether you want me or not, whether you hate me or not, I am your father. I’m not going anywhere.”