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His beyond shell-shocked parents talked over each other, then stopped.
Then his father’s face crumpled as he staggered back as if under a bone-crushing blow. He would have fallen on the ground if Ivan hadn’t caught him and lowered him onto an armchair.
The moment he straightened, his mother was clawing at him, crying, then bawling such ugly, violent sobs he felt as if she was being torn apart inside.
Ivan had dealt with death, with danger and violence of the most extreme magnitudes. But against tears, especially Anastasia’s and now his mother’s, he was totally powerless.
Looking around, as if seeking help, he found Anastasia staring at him limply. Her parents had sat down, looked as if they’d turned to stone. No help was coming from any of them.
Forcing himself to contain his mother, he led her to sit in the armchair next to his father, who was weeping, too, silent tears that were somehow even more distressing to Ivan.
Knowing this had to end, once and for all, he went down on his haunches before them. “My view of this isn’t as harsh as Anastasia. She’s angry on my behalf, far more than I’ve ever been on my own. I understood you made a terrible decision, to save Katerina and Fedora and Ivanna and Dimitri, not only yourselves. And maybe you didn’t realize what would happen, what they’d do to me. But as I told you before, I survived, and then some. And now I have Anastasia, and I love her and I am happy with her, beyond comprehension. I know it won’t be easy, living with this now that the past is exhumed, but—”
His father lurched forward, his hand trembling to Ivan’s face, his eyes blood-red. “We believed that you died.”
Ivan’s jaw clenched. “It was always a possibility to die there.”
His father shook his head vigorously. “No, no, we were told you died in a car accident before you even reached the academy you were supposed to join, what we fully believed was a legitimate institution.”
Ivan stared at him. Did he mean...?
“We never suspected anything of what Ana said. We thought we lost you to a senseless accident like we lost Alex!”
His mother again snatched at anything she could hold of him, ended up grabbing his jacket, his shirt, his hair. “You thought we abandoned you? Sold you? Bozhe moy...”
She burst into another jag of demolishing weeping as she pitched forward to kiss his hand and bathe it in her tears.
As he tried to drag his hand away, his heart stuttering in his chest, his father grabbed his other hand.
“It was years before we could get over our grief and guilt for sending you somewhere without us. Just that we weren’t there for you, that we thought you died alone, almost drove us both mad. It was only having to care for our other children that forced us to continue to function. If we’d known anything about the true nature of that place, if we even suspected for a second you wouldn’t get the best treatment, wouldn’t be achieved and happy there, that we wouldn’t see you again soon, we would have rather died than send you there.”
Ivan stared at the parents he’d once loved with everything in him, whom he’d missed and felt their loss like that of a vital organ.
And he knew one thing.
They were telling the truth.
Ten
Ivan had felt his whole belief system being rewritten once before. When everything told him that his parents had abandoned him in the worst way possible.
Now everything said they hadn’t. Every cell in his body screamed it, had been screaming it since he’d looked into their eyes again.
The knowledge was absolute, incontrovertible.
This time no amount of circumstantial evidence would convince him differently.
And it was like an earthquake was unleashed inside him, sending everything crashing, the pillars he’d built his life around collapsing, pulverizing each other and everything else.
He vaguely realized the pain he was feeling was only the beginning of a process that would reform his memories, his psyche. There was no escaping letting the process take its course, no ameliorating the pangs of this excruciating rebirth.
He could only do one thing.
Kneeling before his parents, his hands shook as he took a hand from each, his heart squeezing as he felt how fragile they’d become. This wasn’t only a sign of aging, it was the unremitting effects of loss.
His loss. He knew it.
He let them know he did. “I believe you. And I will never be able to beg your forgiveness enough for believing any differently of you. My only excuse is that it was horrific, not only being in that hellhole, but being without you. I guess at first I needed to believe you sacrificed me so I could let you go, and let hope and life itself go, so I’d escape my prison. Later I needed to believe it so it would harden me, so I could survive.”
