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“If I go back, I won’t be free, either.”
“You won’t be in hiding,” Dad argues. “I think that’ll make a difference.”
“You really think I should go back?”
“Well, I’m not sure you have a choice,” he says bluntly. “Which meansdecidingto go will at least put you in charge of your own choices.”
“That’s a fake autonomy,” I snap. “That’s pretending I have a steering wheel, when in reality, the brakes are cut and we’re going faster and faster down a collision course with something that won’t yield.”
He chews his nail. “Acceptance of what’s beyond our control is sometimes a necessary evil, Little Bird.”
“It’s quitting. That’s all it is. It’s giving up.”
“Not everything is worth a fight.”
I can feel the fatigue in his words as he says them. I think about how hard he tried to keep us safe. What he’d ended up with was one daughter married to the most dangerous man he knew. And another daughter pregnant by the same man. All that fighting and scheming and hoping…all for nothing.
There are days when I resent my father for all his bad choices.
But not today.
Today, I pity him.
“It helps a little,” I say. “To know why you were so protective of Celine and me.”
“Does it?”
“Some days, it does,” I answer honestly. “Other days, it feels like you were lying to us about everything for no reason at all.”
He glances at me warily. Any time we’ve really talked about the past, it’s ended up in a fight. Then he says something he regrets, and I say something I regret, and it ends with several days of tense silence, before the minutia of the day-to-day makes us forget that we’re angry with one another.
“It felt right that I should carry the burden of knowing. It didn’t seem fair to bring the three of you in with me. In any case, you girls were too young. But your mother…I came close to telling her so many times.”
“What stopped you?”
It feels silly that I’m only asking these questions now. But it’s not that I haven’t asked them before; the difference is that I genuinely want to know this time.
“The first time, I chickened out,” he says with a heavy sigh. “I lost my nerve at the last minute and decided it was okay to be a coward because we were going out for ice cream and no one tells his wife that he’s a low-levelvorin a Russian Bratva over a pint of rocky road.”
“Fair.” I can’t argue that. “You were low level?”
“At the time, yes. It was Ludwig who brought me on board. You girls were tiny then.”
“Ludwig?”
“Ilarion’s father.”
“Fuck,” I breathe, wishing there was a bottle of liquor lying around. I’m not a big drinker, but some days, and some conversations, just require a stiff drink. “It’s so weird to think that you knew Ilarion’s father. That youworkedfor him.”
“He was not a good man.”
“The organized crime thing tipped you off, huh?” I ask sarcastically.
“You have every right to be mad at me. I apologize if I’ve ever made you feel otherwise. I know that my actions had consequences. It’s just hard for me to take your anger. It’s the coward in me, I suppose.”
“Dad. You’re not a coward.”
He shakes his head mournfully. “Yes, I am. And one day, I’ll tell you the exact moment I knew that for sure.” He exhales deeply, his eyebrows dip down, and I know he’s thinking about Mom. He gets a specific look on his face when he thinks of her. Like a man who’s drifting in outer space and has no idea if he’ll ever find gravity again. “The second time I tried to tell her… Well, your nana passed away, and that took up a few months of our lives. And the third time, she was diagnosed with cancer.”
