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“I don’t hate you!” I insist.
“So it’s love, then?”
I look back out to the water. There is no crocodile barreling towards the shore. No Kirill, muscles rippling in the dusky light, arrowing towards me.
Somewhere deep inside, disappointment festers.
“The love theory is not so far off,” I admit both to him and myself.
“Okay, then,” Marcus says. “Whoever the bastard is, I hope he knows how good he’s got it.”
I snort a little harder than I mean to. “Here’s to hoping.”
* * *
Yuliana is exhausted after the sand and the sun. She’s quiet throughout her bath. She usually is after a busy day. Talking takes more energy than she has some evenings.
At bedtime, I tuck her beneath her purple mermaid bedding and lie next to her. But just as I start to sing, she reaches over and grabs my hand.
“Who is Ilya?” she asks in her sleepy voice.
For the second time in one day, my heart lodges in my throat. I have to fight to talk around it, gasping for air. “Where did you hear that name?”
“That guy.”
Marcus, she means. I should have known she was paying attention. My little eavesdropper doesn’t miss a thing.
“He’s no one,” I say. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, though, I have the sense I just betrayed Ilya. “That’s not true. He’s… someone I used to know.”
“Who?”
Your uncle?
A friend of a friend?
I decide quickly to skip the labels and get to the meat of it. “He was someone a lot like you, actually.”
“Your daughter?” she splutters, face screwed up in confusion.
I laugh and run my hand through her hair. “I only have one of those. Ilya was a man, but he had a hard time talking, too.”
“Did he go to a speech teacher?” she asks.
“Not that I know of. But he had family who helped him.”
Kirill took such good care of Ilya. I think Ilya was Kirill’s heart, a vital organ beating outside of his body. The same way Yuliana is mine.
“Did he get better?” Yuliana asks.
Suddenly, tears burn, and I have to blink them back. I cover them with a smile. “In a way, yeah. Wherever he is now, I’m sure he’s all better.”
12
KIRILL
I’ve been in the kitchen for fifteen minutes and Natalia has already walked through six times.
The last time I saw her was at the bar the other night when I tossed her best friend in the ocean. Since then, she’s steered clear of me.
