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Gritting her teeth, Anastasia said, “Yeah, it’s called charisma and influence. He makes everyone feel this way.”
Aunt Glenda sat up closer, her eyes so earnest. “It’s not that, though I do recognize this about him. There’s just this...huge side to him I feel he’s hiding.”
“Yes, exactly.” That was Anastasia’s mother, sitting up on her other side, making her feel they were squeezing her in the middle with their curiosity and concern. “It’s like there’s another person beneath it all. Are you aware of that? Do you know who he really is under this...facade?”
“It’s not like I’m worried that he doesn’t love you as completely as you love him—” Aunt Glenda stopped, seemed to be getting more distressed the more she tried to explain. “It’s just... I wonder about what he’s hiding. I know it’s crazy, but what I feel...” She looked back at him and fell silent.
So recognition was haunting her, despite the transfiguring changes he’d undergone, through ordeals, maturation and intention. And she was disturbed, groping for explanations, something to make her feel secure again in the safe, suburban life she’d built, and paid for with his life.
Aunt Glenda looked back at her, putting down her cup, looking frustrated, even agitated. “God, I wish I could explain it. I wish I knew what I was feeling.”
Every word had been falling on Anastasia like a scythe, slashing every fiber of restraint.
The last words severed the final tether, and she snapped.
Heaving up to her feet, she shouted, “What you’re feeling is recognition, Aunt Glenda. Recognition of the son you sold to slavers, in return for a way out of Russia and a new life in the States. Slavers who tortured, degraded and exploited him in unimaginable ways!”
* * *
Ivan had picked up the feeling that something was going wrong across the room. He’d excused himself from his companions at once and had started rushing there even before he realized what was going on.
But it all happened before he could stop it. Anastasia was on her feet, screaming, everything—everything—pouring out of her.
He was running now, feeling both their fathers in his wake, cold sweat starting to bead on his forehead, knowing that whatever he did now, it was too late.
Anastasia sounded as if she was tearing apart her vocal chords. “How dare you sit there pretending you’re a normal person? A woman and a mother? A human being even? That you have any kind of feelings? You sold your son! Your firstborn! The genius boy who loved you completely and trusted you implicitly!”
Ivan finally reached Anastasia, put himself between her and the others, taking her by the shoulders, tried to make her look at him, to silence her. “Stop. Anastasia, stop. Come with me, please.”
But she only pushed against him, twisting in his hold, around his bulk, seeking to reconnect her wrath with its targets, eyes feverish between both his parents now, shaking so hard it was like she was having a seizure. Her voice had become a butchered wail, again making him realize what she now knew of his past hurt her even more than it had
ever hurt him.
“Didn’t you ever think of the devastation he felt when he realized you betrayed and bartered him? Didn’t you ever feel sorry all these years that you sent your own son to hell, to buy yourselves this easy, petty life? Didn’t you ever imagine the kind of horrors he faced, the agony and desperation he endured?” She lurched out of his hold completely, no longer Anastasia, but a rage-filled entity as she shrieked her condemnations. “And after everything you did to him—after he overcame it all and became the best man on earth—he never wanted revenge, only never wanted to see you again. That’s why he lost seven more years of his life, when he could have been with me. He only found me again through tragedy. And for me, he not only let himself be exposed to you, he did what I thought impossible. He was kind to you. He forgave you. When you’re monsters! Monsters who don’t even deserve to live!”
Ivan had dragged her in his arms as she screamed, but had been unable to stop her tirade. He now subdued her efforts to fight him away, pressing her head into his chest, murmuring pleas for her to stop. He had to stem the tide of wrath and misery that was undoing her right before his eyes.
But she’d already expended every last spark of energy, now sagged against him, too drained to even tremble anymore.
It was only after he made sure this paroxysm was over, and he’d carried her to the nearest couch, soothed and revived her as much as he could, that he finally remembered the presence of the others.
Turning his gaze, he found them all frozen in their exact positions. His parents looked as if their hearts had been ripped out, their faces blank in that shocked denial before the injury registered and the collapse occurred.
“K-Konstantin? Kostya?”
His mother sounded as if someone was choking her as she said his name, and the nickname she’d used to call him with.
Giving Anastasia one last kiss, begging her again not to move, to let him handle this, he rose to his feet.
There was no escaping it anymore. Here was the confrontation he’d lived almost three decades dreading.
Coming to stand before his parents, he nodded. “It’s me.”
Looking as if they thought they were losing their minds, they reached out their hands to him, as if to make sure he was real.
“That’s—that’s the explanation for wh-what our hearts have been telling us about you...”
“We thought you were lost to us all these years ago...”
