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Poor Lina.
Kira smiled. “How about some vodka instead?”
Lina lifted her eyebrows. “Now you are talking.”
Zoya cast a glance at Lina and made a noise of disapproval. “Don’t encourage her.”
They made their way to the kitchen and spent a happy two hours eating and drinking and filling each other in on the month they’d been apart. By the time they made their way to Lina’s homemade pavlova and tea, they’d started telling stories about Kira’s father.
Some of them were funny and some of them made her sad, but it felt good to talk about her father again, to acknowledge the loss in a way she hadn’t been able to in the immediate aftermath of his death.
Zoya and Lina were doing the dishes, chatting quietly in Russian, when Kira pulled on her boots and coat and let herself out the terrace doors. Zoya gave her a glance, but she didn’t say anything.
The terrace was covered in snow, and the outdoor furniture that had been left outside looked ghostly draped in snow-covered tarps. A path had been cleared to the terrace steps, and Kira said a silent thank you to Peter for keeping the grounds in order while she’d been gone.
It was a pleasant job in the summer — mowing and pulling weeds and working in the gardens Peter loved — but it had to have been a trying task in winter.
She made her way down the steps and started across the lawn. Here too a path had been shoveled, this one leading straight to her destination. She wasn’t the only one who’d traveled this route in the weeks since her father’s death, and she followed the footprints to the family graveyard at the back of the property.
The day was cold, the sky blue and almost painfully clear overhead. The sun seemed to mock her as she made her way across the lawns. It shone so brightly it hurt her eyes, and yet it didn’t warm her at all.
By the time she reached the iron gate, her face stung from the cold, her hands almost numb despite her leather gloves.
She opened the gate and stepped into the cemetery.
Her parents were buried side by side, as was their wish, and she remembered her father bringing her here to leave flowers for her mother in the summer. Now he lay beside her under the cold hard ground, a fresh bouquet of yellow roses leaning against both their granite markers.
“Thank you, Lina,” she murmured. She paused in front of her mother’s marker and touched a hand to the cold stone. “Hello,Mamachka. I miss you.”
She hesitated, then continued to her father’s headstone.
Viktor Grigoryevich Baranov
Husband, Father, Leader
“Hi,Pápochka. How are you?” She waited in the ensuing silence, listening to the wind whistle through the trees in the cemetery. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I… I’ve been away.”
She wished it was summer, wished she could lay on the grass in front of her father’s headstone, wished she could lay there under the warm sun and tell him everything the way she used to.
But all she could do was stand before him. Hope he would forgive her.
You’ve gotten too close…
She heard his words as clearly as the day he’d spoken them.
Except she hadn’t listened.
“You were right, Papa.” Giving her body to Lyon was one thing. It was to be expected, given their arrangement.
But she’d gone further. So much further.
She’d given him her heart, and that had obscured everything she’d promised never to forget about him.
Opportunist. Criminal. Killer.
It had all been true, was still true, and she’d been willing to forget it with one touch of his hand, one moment inside her.
All those weeks on the island, she’d started to wonder if she’d made a mistake leaving Lyon. If she’d been so distraught by her father’s death that she’d given up the only thing — the only person — worth fighting for in the disaster that had become her life.
