“Have you always lived here?” I ask.
Yaromir’s steps slow. Not enough for someone else to notice, maybe. But I’m watching him too closely now. I see the change. His face gives away nothing, but something in him closes. The little space he had allowed between us during the tour disappears.
“No,” he says.
I wait, but he says nothing else.
I look toward the tall windows at the end of the landing. Outside, the grounds stretch into dark green trees and gray stone paths.
“It doesn’t look like the main Volkov estate.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then whose was it?”
“A man named Belov.”
The name means nothing to me.
Yaromir keeps walking, so I follow.
“He was close to my father once,” he says. “Close enough to be trusted. Stupid enough to think trust meant ownership.”
I look at him carefully. His voice is calm, but it’s too calm.
“What happened?”
“He took something that belonged to my mother.”
The sentence sits between us.
I think of the ring. The way he looked at it the first day at the pier. The coldness in his face when he saw it on my hand.
“What did he take?” I ask.
“This house.”
I stop looking at the walls and really see them. The size of the place. The old money in it. The careful restoration. The silence.
“This was your mother’s house?”
“It should have been.”
Yaromir pauses near a window overlooking the back garden. Below, the trees bend slightly in the wind. His reflection is faint in the glass, scarred and still.
“She grew up here,” he says. “Before my father. Before the Volkov name meant anything to her. Her family had money once. Not power, but enough. When she became inconvenient, this house became one of the things men decided she no longer needed.”
I don’t speak.
I suddenly feel as if the walls are listening.
“Belov helped make that happen,” Yaromir continues. “He moved his family in after she was gone. Wife, sons, grandchildren. They lived here for fifteen years.”
“And you bought it from him?”
Yaromir turns his head slightly. “No.”
A small chill moves down my back.
