Eight pulled her knees up and tucked her chin against them, still keeping watch on the road. She leaned toward the sound. Just barely. Just enough that I could tell.
She had her mother's jaw. I'd known it since the first time I saw her on my screen. Nadia had that same frown. Nadia had used it on me the first time I'd said something stupid, which was the first time I'd opened my mouth, and she'd kept using it until the last time I'd seen her face.
I ran the stone along the blade and kept my breathing even.
Eight's hair had fallen across her forehead the way Nadia's used to when she leaned over a book. I kept sharpening.
I tested the edge with my thumb. It bit back. I handed the knife to her. She took it and turned it in her palm, testing the new weight. She ran her own thumb along the flat of the blade, the same place I'd just tested the edge, and I had to look at the road.
Then she stood and threw. The blade went through the bark and into the green wood underneath with a sound like a branch snapping. She stared at the handle sticking out of the trunk.
I stubbed the cigarette on the wall.
"I need to tell you something," I said in Russian and lit another cigarette because I needed something to do with my hands. "I'm saying it in Russian because I don't think you can understand me, and that's the only reason I can say it at all."
She pulled the knife from the trunk and turned to face me. Her expression gave me nothing.
"I'm your father."
She stood by the tree with the knife in her hand, and I sat on the wall with my elbows on my knees, and ten feet of wet grass sat between us.
"Your mother." I stopped. "Her name was Nadia. She had your jaw. Your frown. She was..." I stalled out and tried again. "She was smarter than me. Smarter than anyone I've ever met. And she deserved better than what I gave her."
I ground the cigarette into the stone.
"I wasn't good to her. I couldn't figure out why. Why I went cold every time she got close. Why I couldn't be what sheneeded." I stared at the grass between my boots and didn't finish the sentence.
She stood still. The knife hung at her side.
"She died, and I didn't even know about you. Zeus never told me. I found out after, and by then he had you and I was atimia. Gone." I closed my fist around the lighter in my pocket and squeezed until the metal bit. "I told myself you were safer without me. That was a lie. You weren't safer. I was just scared."
"Alaska." The word came out flat. "I put a gun to your head. You need to know why."
She didn't move. I kept going because stopping would be worse.
"Zeus had you for nine years. I needed to know if..." I stopped. Started again. "If there was anything left. Of you. Or if they'd turned you into something else." The cigarette burned down to my fingers. "So I put the barrel against your temple and I looked at you."
I swallowed.
"You looked back. Didn't blink." The lighter dug into my palm. "And you were still in there. All of you. After everything they'd done."
She hadn't moved. The knife stayed at her side. Her eyes stayed on my face.
"Your mother was like that. She never..." I stopped again. The cigarette had burned down to my fingers, and I dropped it and let it die in the grass. "Nadia never broke either. I don't know what to call that. Whatever it is, you have it, and you didn't get it from me."
The quiet stretched between us. The music from the house had stopped, or I'd stopped tracking it. The SUV headlights burned white at the end of the road. Eight stood by the olive tree with her mother's face and my blood and a knife she'd learned to throw by standing close to me.
She crouched. I almost said something, but she wasn't coming toward me. She pressed her finger into the bare dirt at the base of the tree and dragged it through the soil. When she stepped back, I saw she’d written two words in Cyrillic, scratched into the dirt in block capitals.
? ????.
I know.
My lungs emptied. I gripped the stone railing because the ground had tilted and I needed something solid. She understood Russian. She'd understood every word I'd said in front of her for months. Every curse, every muttered aside, every time I'd talked to myself because I'd assumed she couldn't follow.
She'd kept it the way she kept everything. And she'd waited.
I looked at the letters in the dirt, then at her. She held my gaze, and for half a second she was just my kid, standing in the dark with dirt on her fingers, telling me she'd been listening the whole time.
