Page 51 of My Wedding Night Massacre

A pause, shorter than usual. “I’m glad you’re thinking clearly. My men will collect you in one hour. Krasnov church.”

The line goes dead before I can respond.

I stand in the kitchen for thirty seconds. Then I write a note, set it on the counter where Slava will see it, and leave.

I take a cab to the church. My father’s men are already there when I arrive, two of them, a black car idling at the curb. I get in without being asked. I sit in the back seat and watch the city move past the window. I run every version of this that ends badly, there are several, but I go anyway because it’s been ten days since I last held my son.

The safe house is in the outer boroughs. From the street, it looks ordinary, indistinguishable from every other house on the block, nothing that would catch the eye. Inside, it’s clean and adequate, though it doesn’t exactly scream comfort. The furniture is functional, the light is flat, and the rooms are silent in the way of places where sound is managed rather than lived in. It’s entirely wrong as a place for a child.

I hear him before I see him.

His voice, two years old and enormous, coming from somewhere down the corridor, talking to someone with the full conviction of a person who has opinions and wants them known. I recognize Nadia’s voice answering.

She comes through the door first, and the sight of her stops me for half a second. She’s thinner. There are lines around her eyes that weren’t there three days ago. She looks at me, and her face does that thing it does when she’s feeling more than she’ll say, a compression of everything into her eyes before she gets it back under control.

Denis is behind her, and then he sees me.

His whole face changes. Not slowly, not in stages, all at once, the total transformation of a small person who has found the thing he was looking for. He crosses the room at full speed with his arms already out.

I have a maximum of two seconds to assemble myself before he reaches me.

I crouch and open my arms. He hits me at full force, his arms going around my neck, his face pressing into my shoulder. I hold him and breathe him in, giving myself exactly the time it takes for him to settle before I trust my voice again.

“Hi, baby,” I say.

“Mama.” His arms tighten. Then, pulling back to look at me with the seriousness of someone who’s been waiting to say this, “You were busy.”

“I was,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

He considers this, his small hands on my face, checking me the way he always does, as if verifying that I’m real, present, and the version of me he remembers. His eyes are Slava’s grey, serious in the way Slava’s are. I allow myself exactly thirty seconds with that before I put it away.

“I made a picture,” he says.

“Can I see it?”

He’s already moving, pulling free of my arms to go get it, the injustice of the last ten days apparently resolved now that I’m here. I stand up.

My father comes through the door a moment later. He takes in the room, me, and Denis’s retreating back. He crosses to the chair across the room and sits, one leg crossed over the other.

“He’s been well,” my father says. Not to Denis. To me. A report delivered to the person who needs the information most and has the least power to act on it.

“He looks it,” I say.

“He asked for you every day.” He says it without inflection, which is when it’s most dangerous. “I told him you’d been working something out. He seemed to understand.”

I look at my father across the room. “He’s two.”

“Children understand more than we give them credit for,” my father says. He folds his hands in his lap. “I’m glad you came, Pavlina. It’s good for him to see you.”

He doesn’t speak again after that. He doesn’t interact with Denis. He simply watches me the way a man watches a transaction he wants to see completed correctly. The watching is its own message, the whole visits its own message, and we both know it.

Denis comes back with the picture. He made it himself, he tells me, his voice brimming with the pride of someone who’s done important work and wants credit. It’s a figure with dark hair and a wide smile, rendered in crayon with complete conviction. He points to her. “Mama,” he says.

“I love it,” I say, meaning it.

I read to him next, a book he selects with great consideration. He leans against my side, and I read each page with complete attention, doing the voices, answering his questions about why the bear did what it did and whether bears can actually talk. He has opinions about this. I take all of them seriously. My father continues watching from across the room.

Denis is bigger. His vocabulary has expanded, his sentences are longer, and he uses words I didn’t know he had.