I laugh. “And look how it turned out for me.”
He narrows his eyes. “We should count our blessings, and the children are mine.” He doesn’t have to say it, but I get what he means, and it makes something ugly go through me. My children are bastards, and he gave them his name. I should be grateful for that.
That’s what makes me sick.
Mama appears in the doorway before the moment can harden further.
“Sergei,” she says, as if she has been there longer than either of us realized. “The Kurylenko call is waiting.”
Papa looks at her, then at me, then at Nikolai tucked against my side.
Something unreadable passes over his face.
Finally, he says, “Go to your lesson, Kolya.”
Nikolai nods. I take him out of the room without another word.
In the hall, he tilts his face up to mine. “Did I do something bad?”
The question slices clean through me.
“No, baby.”
“Then why are you angry?”
I crouch so we are eye level. “I’m not angry with you.”
He considers this. “You were angry like when Sofia colored on the dog.”
I almost laugh. Almost. “I was angry at grown-ups,” I say. “That’s different.”
He seems to accept this and takes my hand.
Sofia crashes into us at the end of the hall, smelling of soap and rebellion, and the moment breaks. She’s furious because her nanny brushed her hair ‘too straight,’ and she needs me to fix it immediately because apparently that’s now a crisis of state.
I let the children pull me back into their little world.
That’s how I survive here.
Not by fighting every battle the moment it appears. I would die tired if I tried. I survive by anchoring myself to them. To Sofia’s outrage over hair. To Nikolai’s careful little silences. To bath time, tutors, stories, socks lost under beds, oatmeal spilled on tablecloths.
The rest of the house can be angry all it likes.
My children are still children.
For now, that has to be enough.
But later, when I’m alone in my room, fastening my earrings for dinner, I catch my reflection in the long mirror and feel the whole weight of it again.
I’m twenty-nine now, not the girl who boarded that flight in a fitted blouse and heartbreak. Motherhood changed my body, but not in ways this house is willing to name kindly. I was soft before. A little full through the hips, generous in the chest, easy for people to call curvy when they meant not thin.
After the twins, I became even more that way. I’m heavier in the breasts, my waist is softer, my stomach marked and tender in ways it never was before. My hips are broader now, my thighs fuller, my body shaped less like a bride and more like a mother.
What would Roman think?
I hate myself the moment the thought comes to me. How would that even matter? I left him back in Moscow, and for all I know he’s still there.
Papa tells me at four thirty, when I’m halfway through helping Sofia button a cardigan she insists is for ‘queens only.’
