Page 150 of Boardroom Mask

Squinting, I see, on the muted TV above the counter, a news anchor mouthing words beneath a chyron that reads:LAZAREV TO MAKE PUBLIC STATEMENT WITHIN THE HOUR.

I throw a twenty on the table and run.

63

KIR

“We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year”

— “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd

I almost didn’t come.

I sat in my car for a long time with the engine running as reporters and camera crews piled onto the courthouse steps, preparing to watch my father sign his own death warrant. In the end, I got out and walked over for one reason and one reason only: the realization that I’ve spent my entire life watching my father from a distance.

From the crack in a closet door. From across a boardroom table. Always removed by a layer of something invisible and impenetrable.

Fuck it. If this is the end of our relationship, might as well watch it from up close and personal.

Now, I’m leaning against a stone pillar at the far edge of the crowd, sunglasses on, collar up. Nobody recognizes me backhere, or if they do, they’re too focused on the main event to care. There must be two hundred reporters jammed onto the steps, plus another dozen camera operators and a wall of satellite trucks lining the curb.

Soon, the courthouse doors open.

And Lukas Lazarev emerges.

My father looks thinner and older than the last time I saw him, but no less formidable. His clothes are neat and clean and his face is somber. The cuffs are gone, which means he posted bail.

He steps up to the cluster of microphones, and the crowd goes dead quiet. He opens his mouth to speak—but just before the words emerge, his eyes find mine. Then, like that was the cue he needed, he begins.

“Eighteen years ago,” he says to the hushed, roiling crowd, “I killed my wife.”

The way it goes from there is like a series of stab wounds. My father speaks in simple, short, clipped sentences, and each one of them rips me apart from the inside out.

He tells the world that his wife, the love of his life, was dying. Cancer is a cruel and vicious animal, and it had Elena Lazareva in its jaws. He tried to save her, he swears he did, but some things can’t be slain, not even by the great and powerful Lukas Lazarev.

So she chose a different way out. On her own terms, not cancer’s. She refused to die by inches in front of her son. In front ofme.

Lukas tried to convince her otherwise, but my mother was as stubborn as she was beautiful. In the end, he loved her too much to make her suffer for his sake.

She had one other request, and she wore him down until she extracted his promise: that I never know she chose to leave me. She couldn’t bear to think that I’d believe she abandoned her son. I wonder if she knows, wherever she is now, that I’ve spent eighteen years despising the man who helped her go instead.

There it is, then. The full truth revealed, like a body on the autopsy table. My father didn’t kill my mother, and I’ve wasted half my life on hating him for committing the greatest self-sacrifice I’ve ever known.

What does that make me?

All those emotional stab wounds add up, but when I reach a breaking point, it doesn’t go how I imagined. I expected the floor to open up. Some kind of biblical collapse, the pillars cracking and the ceiling caving in. I thought all those little details of hating my father—blood on his shirt, dirt under his nails, cold silences, brutal lessons, every last disappointed glance—would detonate and ruin me.

None of that happens.

It all just goesquiet. As if someone found a hidden switch inside me and turned it off. There is only silence where the hate used to live. I don’t know what is supposed to make me tick instead.

My mother chose to die. She loved me enough to leave before she was forcibly taken. And my father… my father loved her enough to let me hate him for it.

What does that make me?

Who am I now?

And worst of all…What the fuck have I done?