3.

So there we were, sitting on the steps by the green river, swigging beer and hiding it from the lazy cops. Ulyanka had thought about getting a nonalcoholic one, but went for the regular stuff—one beer wouldn’t do anything to him, in there. We washed it down with crackers that tasted like dog food.

There was a low gray bridge nearby, and right there stood Vologda’s proud First Electric Streetlamp, a monument to itself, while busy pigeons milled around, hoping to get their cut of the Kirieshki. The river rolled by like a conveyor belt of time; you can’t step into it twice, for fuck’s sake. What’s done is done.

“We’re not jumping in,” Kristinka decided for both of them.

“Was it really so hard for you?” Ulyana said at last.

“Ew! He’s genuinely disgusting! Sorry. Could you have done it yourself?”

“Disgusting,” Ulyana recalled. “Seriously. Whatever, anyway.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Fuck if I know.”

She finished her beer, went to the kiosk, and got two more bottles. She popped one open on the curb and handed Kristinka her share. She took a big gulp and choked. Kris laughed and sprayed beer, and Ulyanka started laughing too. They sat there like that, cackling like a couple of hysterics.

“Four-eyed prick,” Ulyana said of Anatoly Sergeyevich.

“Yeah, fuck him!” Kristinka agreed.

“Amen to that.”

They each took another sip.

“Fuck, I wish there were a life where nobody could fire you!” Ulyana sighed. “God, I’m so fucking tired.”

“Does a life like that even exist?”

“That’s why you have to be your own boss instead of breaking your back for some guy. Otherwise you spend your whole life drifting around like shit in a hole in the ice.”

“You’ll hire me when you’re the boss?” Kris smiled.

“Of course I will. If only I had somewhere to hire you to.”

They kissed each other. It was stupid, but for a minute she felt a little better. Kris took Ulyana’s fingers in her hand and stroked them. The clouds parted, and a ray of sunlight fell to the ground. Ulyana tossed some Kirieshki to the pigeons, and they cooed with delight. It felt as if maybe they could somehow go on existing after all.

“But if you’re the first one to get some kind of opening… A job, I mean… You should let me know too,” Ulyana asked.

“Okey-dokey.”

They hugged again. The beer was gone; time to say goodbye.

“Well, that’s that.”

“Okay, then. Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

She trudged home—and away from Kris, who’d been pulling her upward like a helium balloon, Ulyanka was pressed down to earth again by fucking gravity. And the beer wore off right away, the bastard.

She was alone now. Alone in the whole damn universe.

Boss of what, for fuck’s sake? Nothing. Keep dreaming, idiot.

And that’s how the train hit her. She died, and it was her own fault. You knew it would happen, didn’t you? You knew. So why’d you throw that guy out? What were you counting on? Luck? Justice? There’s no luck or justice in this world, you stupid bitch. Strength, now—that exists. The weak get eaten. When are you going to grow up? When are you going to learn to think?

On the way, she stopped, sat down on a bench, and opened her phone.

Everything was spinning, and the world was coming unstuck into incoherent pieces. The low houses, the green bushes, the dusty roads, the lost-looking people, the empty sky—it had all turned into some kind of nonsense, into the shards of a broken cup. Once the fragments had been swept into a dustpan, nothing of the whole that had been there before was visible anymore. What the hell had all this even been for? It really belonged in the trash. Just forget it.

She searched: “How to get an abortion Vologda.”

There were plenty of offers: “Termination of pregnancy from 3,700 rubles. Vacuum mini-abortion, medication abortion 4,500 rubles, surgical 4,000 rubles, one day, no hospitalization.” She read through them and felt even worse. It was all so cheap for a service like that, so quick and convenient. Too cheap for ending your first pregnancy, too easy. On Ulyana’s salary, you could do it fifteen times a month. You could go today, just like that—and snip!

Why not? Bleach out her insides. Get it done, forget it, start with a clean slate. Give up the apartment, go back to her mother’s, cry for three days, well, three weeks, well, three months. And then—start over. Find a new job, find a new apartment, start putting the world back together piece by piece.

Vacuum mini-abortion. It felt as if someone’s hands in foul-smelling rubber gloves had clamped around her throat. Mini. Vacuum. What other choice was there? Drag herself around pregnant now, looking for places hiring, calling ads? A kiosk saleswoman, thirty thousand? A kindergarten teacher? Thirty-two and a half. Maybe go straight to the streets?

No. There was no one to keep it for. No one.

If Sasha were here, she could talk it over with him. Only he’d probably be scared of growing up and ask her to get rid of the baby. Though maybe he’d forbid her to—who knew what war did to men. But where was this Sasha?

She called him. Temporarily unavailable.

She devoured a bar of chocolate, broke it into squares, and wolfed them all down one after another.

It was a good thing she hadn’t told her mother anything yesterday. It would be easier to pretend none of it had happened. No fantasies, no worries, no “what if.” She had no such future, never had. She’d just imagined it.

Kristinka was lucky: crying came as easily to her as taking a piss. Once she cried, all the shit seemed to leave her body at once. Crying was like forcibly rebooting a frozen phone: one—black screen—and a new life, everything working, moving on. But Ulyana couldn’t cry, and the murk kept building up inside her; she had no valve to let it all out in one go. So she sat there, biting the insides of her lips. She liked the taste of rust, and she liked the sting.

The rusty Nine rolled off the asphalt and, its shock absorbers groaning, bounced over the potholes; the asphalt didn’t reach her mother’s house, so they still had to weave through the mud. At least it was a hot summer, so everything had dried out. But in autumn… Nothing but misery.

“Ukrainian forces are experiencing a shortage of motivated soldiers, according to those captured by our units—and their numbers are growing,” the radio read out, with emphasis. “They say the brutal actions of the TCC, the so-called ‘busification,’ when men of any age are rounded up right on the streets of Kyiv, are causing ever greater discontent in Ukraine. Among those who have been ‘busified’ in this way and sent straight to the front without combat training, to be thrown into meat-grinder assaults, the survival rate is approaching zero. As a result, practically everyone tries to desert. Some are lucky enough to end up alive in the hands of our fighters.”

Vitalya gripped the wheel with both hands; Tatyana held a bag of treats against her chest. Their mother rarely left the village, and in Bushuikha itself there was only a kiosk selling bread and vodka. Even the grocery store in the Khoroshevsky settlement had a meager selection.

They’d left the kids in town; the older one was looking after the younger. They used to be able to dump them at Grandma’s for the whole summer; the kids wouldn’t come out of the pond scum. But now you couldn’t drag them there by force. They’d grown up.

Sashka would have come with them now. He loved his granny; she’d raised him and carried him along while Tatyana and Vitalya each worked from whistle to whistle—Vitalya at the repair plant, Tatyana at the poultry farm.

Bushuikha was scattered unevenly on both banks of the Lezha, a marshy river overgrown with reeds. The mosquitoes had it made here; the locals didn’t even feel them anymore. Let them eat, fine. But Tatyana swelled up and itched every time, and that was one reason she hated Bushuikha. That and many others.

Bushuikha, counting Zimnyak and Gora too, had about two hundred houses. There were Vologda dacha owners here as well—an hour’s drive from the city—and the local villagers. Zimnyak had more cottages now, or at least houses with a coat of paint, while on Gora, where her mother’s house stood, the izbas were clad in boards, all blackened by time.

The houses stood in bald patches between shelterbelts; beyond the groves began the fields, beyond the fields more forest, and everything lay flat all the way to the horizon, as though the Lord had leveled this land with a bulldozer. He’d meant to build something, but got distracted by something more interesting, and in the meantime, while it waited, everything had grown over with one kind of mold or another.

They pulled up at the house. Vitalya snapped on the handbrake, and Tatyana grunted as she climbed out. Alma looked at her indifferently, thumping her tail just a little. The door was ajar. Tatyana stepped straight into the entryway: it smelled of damp and propane, and the usual half-darkness reigned. The steps up to the izba had warped and groaned beneath her. On the landing leading to the attic, mushrooms were laid out on a newspaper to dry. In the corner, a mousetrap stood cocked and waiting. Everything was just as it had been a hundred years ago, when Tatyana was a girl.

She pulled open the second door, the one into the house. Low ceiling, the smells of cabbage soup and incense, garlic and old age. Homemade lace hung in the windows. A rug on the wall and a calendar from 1987. Her mother had kept her father’s hobby: figuring out which years had the same dates on the same days of the week, so she could hang up old calendars instead of new ones. In 1987, her father was still alive and looked just like he did in this photograph; Tanya was only twenty, still counting on a completely different fate, thinking she’d get married and escape Bushuikha. But Bushuikha hadn’t let her get far.

“Mom!”

She wasn’t there. Flies buzzed frantically against the glass, trying to get out, while the windowsill below was scattered with the dried-up little corpses of those that had tried to break through the transparent wall before them, their fly brains unable to understand that it was a wall. The unchanging Soviet refrigerator hummed and rattled. Outside, the propeller of the red-star airplane weathervane, knocked together by her father, squeaked on its crooked pole, and Vitalya cleared his throat after taking a drag on his cigarette.

“Out in the garden, maybe… Mom!”

That familiar feeling: Is she dead, perhaps? Such a strange feeling, somewhere between worry, relief, and shame at that relief—all of it at once, in an instant.

She went around the house and out into the garden—no, she wasn’t dead. There she was, sitting on a bench with her back against the little shed, warming herself in the sun.

“Mom! Are you deaf or something? I’ve been calling and calling…”

“Oh. Hello, Tanya. I suppose I am deaf.”

“I was imagining all sorts of things,” Tatyana admitted crossly.

“Sorry. I’d forgotten you were coming.”

“We brought you some groceries.”

“What?”

“Groceries! Potatoes, meat, grains. Tomatoes!”

“What for?” Her mother waved a wrinkled, sunburned hand. “I haven’t even eaten what I have. You spend enough on me already!”

“Then why aren’t you eating?” Tatyana said irritably. “You should eat!”

“I don’t know,” her mother smiled at her toothlessly. “Don’t feel like it.”

Tatyana stood over her, hands on hips. The neglected garden—cabbage used to grow here, potatoes there—was all weeds now, clover, sedge; even the beds had blurred away. How quickly it all went when there was no one to tend it… Only a path to the crooked well had been worn through. The grass stirred, her mother’s white hair stirred, crows cried out. Her mother squeezed her eyes shut and drifted off in thought, as if she’d forgotten she had company.

“You spend so much, Tanya. Buy cucumbers, buy potatoes, buy tomatoes. But look, there’s the garden…” She opened her eyes again. “You could plant things, grow your own. Why buy them? No, they’ll buy them. And let the garden go to ruin.”

“Why have a garden when you can buy things?” Tatyana explained to her as if she were a little girl, as if she were stupid.

Her mother sighed and peered at her through narrowed eyes. Tatyana finally sat down beside her on the bench. Her mother shifted over to make room. She pointed at the greenhouses, where dandelions and thistles now grew beneath the cloudy, tattered plastic:

“See what’s happened to the land. I can’t manage it by myself. If I could, I’d have it all in order here. Is this any kind of life? Weeds and brush. Hogweed! It’s so depressing. You’re all lazy.”

Tatyana was in no mood to hear this.

“Mom! I spent my whole life bent over in this shitty garden! Can’t I have a break from it now?! You got glaucoma here, and Dad—well, he died here! Can’t we at least live like normal people?!”

“Well, what about your father… Men are fragile,” her mother worked her empty mouth and smacked her lips. “And look at you lot, all rich now.”

Her daughter turned her shoulders and chest toward her—her head didn’t turn very well on its own.

“Nothing’s ever good enough for you, either way!”

Her mother nodded. A bumblebee flew by like a little drone. Across the river, dogs barked, slipping into a howl. A calico cat walked along the boundary between her mother’s plot and the neighbor’s.

“Any news about Sanechka?”

“They haven’t said anything,” Tatyana replied.

“Remember, cabbage used to grow here?” Her mother pointed to the invisible beds.

“I remember everything! It grew here my whole life!”

“Well, there you go. When he was about three, I suppose, little Sanechka and I went to pick slugs off this cabbage. The first time he helped me and Grandpa. We were supposed to put them in a jar of gasoline. He says, ‘Grandpa, do they like gasoline? It stinks.’ And your father tells him, ‘No, they die in there.’ So he stopped putting them in the jar, stuffed his pockets full of them instead, then went behind the fence and let them loose in the ditch…” She sighed. “And what became of that boy?”

“He grew into a man,” Tatyana pressed her lips together.

Her mother shook her head thoughtfully, staring into the weeds.

“It was when they beat him at the police station—that’s when he changed.”

Tatyana stiffened.

“So what? His father served, didn’t he? My Vitalya served too. Is he a man or isn’t he? It’s the army, Mom!”

“Oh, give it a rest!” Her mother waved her away. “Can’t you see the difference?”

Vitalya wandered over at the sound of his name, carrying an empty enamel bucket. Since they’d come, he might as well fetch some water. He scratched his ass through his blue satin tracksuit pants.

“Hey there, Mom!”

He pushed through the tall grass toward the crooked apple tree, surveying the neglect with a foolish sadness. He got there, picked a pale apple, took a bite, grimaced, squeezed his eyes shut, but kept chewing. Then he headed farther into the weeds, toward where the raspberry bushes used to be.

“Shame about the raspberries…” he muttered from there.

“What are you mumbling over there?” Tatyana said, as if she hadn’t heard.

“I said, shame about the raspberries!”

Her mother heard him, nodded and smiled, and grew sad too. They’re in cahoots, Tatyana thought angrily.

“Oh, get out of here, you feel sorry for the raspberries! Thirty years of them weren’t enough for you? You feel sorry for the raspberries, but not for me! Was it not enough, five of us squeezed into one and a half rooms? Having to go shit in the shed in winter! Was that not enough? And now both of you are at it, one after the other! Picking on this shitty garden! I hate it, do you understand or not? I hate it! We broke our backs over it our whole lives—first cabbage, then potatoes, weeding, Colorado beetles, all your slugs, greenhouses back and forth every day, hauling water—how much more could we take? You call that a life? No, but you keep whining and whining! For the first time in your life, you’re living like normal people: each kid has their own room, you’re in town, you’ll have heat in winter, you can afford everything, you finally got what you were waiting for from your own government! And he’s still going on about his wormy raspberries! Pah!”

All the same, while she fumed, Vitalya kept picking at the bushes, shoving berries into his mouth. Then he rustled off toward the well. He took hold of the crank, unwound the chain, and dropped the bucket down; somewhere deep below, it splashed dully. In summer the water sank far down; all he’d get now was mud. Her mother’s well needed cleaning too; she’d been asking for ages, but Tatyana couldn’t be bothered for the life of her. The crank squeaked and, with the chain clanking, he began to haul up the full bucket.

“Did we really need all this? We could’ve gone on living little by little off what we had. At least it was ours, ours,” her mother said quietly. “And now… You traded it all away for my Sanechka.”

Tatyana jumped as if stung.

“Let’s go!” she yelled at Vitalya, who had hunched his shoulders even before the shout, when Grandma let those poisonous words out, already knowing the day was over.

Without saying goodbye, without waiting for her husband to draw any water, Tatyana bolted out toward the car. Only when she was already rounding the corner did she throw this at her mother, unable to think of anything else that might sting:

“You’re so ungrateful!”

Her mother didn’t argue. She turned away.

For a few more days Ulyana just sat around at home, lay in bed, only crawled as far as the kitchen and the toilet, stuffed herself with chips, stuffed herself with chocolate, stuffed sausage into her mouth with her hands, didn’t wash, scrolled Reels, scrolled and scrolled and scrolled: bits of Comedy Club, blogger confessions, compilations of accidents, cute kittens, cute puppies, kids saying all kinds of sugary bullshit, dance challenges, lip-sync challenges, the whole truth about Covid, the whole truth about the Special Military Operation, the whole truth about Putin, the whole truth about aliens, more kittens, more dogs, giraffes, the whole truth about pedophiles, horoscopes, cooking—a never-ending stream of garbage that amused her at first, then distracted her, then made her dizzy, but wouldn’t let go; she felt sick and had no will to stop, and the only thing she could do was pass out so she could carry on in the morning. And she didn’t have the strength to get up and go to the clinic and finally get the vacuum mini-abortion, to make herself empty, so meanwhile it kept growing inside her, pressing, demanding, and Ulyana stuffed it with chocolate, placated it with chips, fed it sausage.

Kris called—she let it ring out. A couple of words with Mom. She had no strength for anyone. All her strength had gone back then, into turning off the light. Turns out she’d turned it off inside herself too.

Then the phone beeped again.

And for some reason Ulyana went to answer right away, even though the number was unknown and it could have been a scammer. Something gave a little jump inside her—answer!

“Hello… Ul… Ulka…”

It wasn’t his voice, not really, but someone else’s… As if he were calling her from the other side through a copper wire, and everything living in his voice had withered away along the way, leaving only a kind of rustling, a kind of whisper. But it was his voice. Ulyana recognized it at once. The shock made it impossible to draw breath, and her reply came out strangled too:

“Sasha?”

“Ulka… Hi… It’s me… Listen… I remembered… Remembered your number… It’s me… They let me… Call… I just lost my own number…”

“Sasha, how are you?! Where are you?!”

She sprang up on legs gone soft and unused to living, and began pacing around her little cell. Her heart went trrrrrr, pulse at two hundred, her guts twisted with terror—their fate was turning, being decided all over again, and Sasha, Sasha was alive, while she’d already buried him, the bitch, buried him how many times, and scraped out his baby without asking him, but here he was, and the baby was alive, and she could still take it all back!

“I… I’m here… I think, in Moscow.”

“What are you doing there? God, Sasha, I thought… I was so scared… Are you all right?”

“Me?.. I’m all right. I… I got a little wounded here, basically… I’m in Moscow. I’m in the hospital.”

“Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you write? Do you know how worried we’ve all been?”

“Really?” he rustled, bewildered. “I only just woke up. I was asleep.”

“Well, thank God! Thank God!”

“Ulya… Will you come see me? I’ve missed you…”

“I’ll come! I’ll come! Where do I go?”

“Here. Yeah… I’ll hand the phone to… a friend. Uly… He’ll tell you. It’s his phone. I just need to rest. Okay?”

“Sasha! And you…”

But the phone had already passed to someone else, who told Ulyana that Sasha was in the Moscow region, at the Vishnevsky Hospital, in one of its branches. This man was strange, too, like Sasha, but sturdier, more self-assured. Ulyana dashed around the apartment looking for a pen to write it down, begging him not to hang up. She made it in time, found a pencil, and scrawled the address and the ward. Before he hung up, the man whispered to Ulyana that Sasha was in bad shape, and if she was coming, she should come now, not put it off.

Then it went quiet.

Ulyana stood in the shower for half an hour. She rushed out and the first thing she did was check whether it had even happened. It hadn’t been her imagination. It had happened.

Then she called her mother. She poured it all out at once, jumbled and muddled, babbling, stumbling over her words, telling her story out loud to herself for the first time, too—not in fragments, not in pictures, but in plain human words. First about Sasha, then about getting fired, and finally about the pregnancy, then Sasha again, and the pregnancy all over again.

Her mother only kept gasping and feeling sorry for her. She tried to get a word in, but at first Ulyana simply had to get it all out, because she couldn’t cry it out! Her ears had gone completely blocked, like a black grouse on its lek, and all she could hear was herself. Only when she realized she’d already repeated everything twice and was starting a third round did she stop to catch her breath.

“What a blessing, Ulyash… What a blessing!” her mother said.

“A blessing?” Ulyana repeated mechanically, syllable by syllable, after her mother.

It felt more like a fucking disaster. Like a thousand volts. Like plunging into an ice hole on Epiphany. Like the Unified State Exam, where if you fail, you might as well go hang yourself.

“They say he’s in bad shape.”

“But he’s alive!” her mother objected.

“What does ‘in bad shape’ mean? They said not to delay.”

“Well… Who knows. They didn’t say he was ‘at death’s door.’”

“What am I supposed to do, Mom?” Ulyana asked helplessly.

Now she didn’t want to make the decision herself. She’d been stewing in all this alone for far too long already. She needed to hear from someone older, someone with more experience.

“Well, what do you think? You have to go, Ulyash.”

“I’m scared,” she admitted.

“What else can you do? Not go? You’re carrying his baby. Nothing to be afraid of. It’s the Christian thing to do. You have to.”

“What if he dies, Mom?”

“Oh, as if he’s going to die! He won’t die. You need to see him, you need to support the boy. So? Want me to go with you?”

“No, thanks.”

“Tell him you’re pregnant. You’ll see how much he’ll want to live.”

They both fell silent. It felt strange to be silent on the phone. Some dead noise began filling the silence between them, building up; it had to be released, and quickly. Perhaps they were both thinking the same thing, but luckily her mother was the first to say it:

“You two need to get registered, that’s what.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly that. Register your relationship. Get married. Don’t you understand?”

“I don’t know.”

Of course Ulyana understood everything. But it was hard for her to say it aloud. So her mother helped her again.

“What’s wrong with that? You’ll be raising his child. And the state gives you benefits, by the way. Payments. For families of SVO participants. And if something happens to him…”

“You just said everything would be fine with him!” Ulyana protested.

“Listen… Are you an adult or aren’t you? God willing, everything will be fine. But what if it isn’t? How are you going to bring him up, how are you planning to raise him?”

“I don’t want to think about that, Mom!”

“But you have to think about it! You have to think about everything, in your situation.” Her mother’s voice grew firmer; apparently, in her parental mind she had already run through three versions of Ulyana’s future, calculated them, and reached a verdict. “Who are you to him right now?”

“Nobody.”

“Exactly.”

They listened to the silence on the line a little longer. Ulyana sighed.

“It’s just, you know, still… Going there for that… It’s kind of awful.”

“You’re not going for that. You’re not doing it for yourself.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong with it, Ulyash? You’re entitled to it! Your boyfriend is a participant. You’re his fiancée, practically. You’re entitled, aren’t you?”

“Mom…”

“There you go, ‘Mom.’ Look into it before your belly starts showing. And then his mother will find out, too… They’ll probably notify her soon, if they haven’t already.”

At the mention of Tatyana Nikolayevna, bile flooded Ulyana’s insides and left a bitter taste in her mouth. She raked her nails over her skin. She hadn’t thought about Tatyana at all until her mother brought her up. Suddenly it was clear: she had to go, and quickly, before that little door slammed shut again, slammed shut and disappeared, leaving nothing but a brick wall—and nothing left for Ulyana to choose from.

“But how am I supposed to go? Where will I stay there? I got fired. I’m completely broke.”

“You can stay with our Moscow relatives. Aunt Marina’s.”

“When did I last see them, Mom? Twenty years ago?”

“So what? She’s my sister, after all.”

“Your cousin.”

“Well, a cousin. Still family, still blood.”

“Do you think they’ll let me stay?”

“They will. I’ll call. As soon as we hang up, I’ll ring them.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

But when her mother hung up, all her strength drained away at once, like water into sand. Ulyana had been dancing on strings, seeming alive, but when the strings were let go, she turned into a rag. She crumpled onto the mattress and became an embryo herself. Did she even have the right to do all this?

No, she couldn’t think about Sasha possibly dying. She couldn’t think about money. What did money have to do with anything? Money had nothing to do with it.

At night she opened her eyes. Fumbled for her phone. Pulled it close. Opened the search engine with the artificial intelligence Kris had installed for her. She rubbed her fingertips together. Tried to think of how to ask. Her temples throbbed. She looked at the moon outside the window. It hung there whole, red and ominous. The moon had probably woken her.

She started typing into the search bar: “How much coffin money are the widows of SVO participants entitled to?” Then she felt ashamed of the phrase “coffin money,” changed her mind just in time, and wrote simply “payments” before submitting the query, so she wouldn’t give herself away to the American AI.

It immediately laid everything out neatly, better than any Gosuslugi. “Presidential payment: 5,000,000 rubles, divided between widow and parents; one-time Ministry of Defense benefit: 5,524,892 rubles, divided between widow and parents; insurance payment from Sogaz LLC: 3,400,000 rubles, divided among the beneficiaries.” If the widow has no children, she gets a third; if she has a child, then half of the whole amount. Zeros, zeros, zeros. Some kind of nullification. The zeros made her head spin and turned her stomach.

Could I really be that much of a piece of shit? Ulyana asked herself.

And further down there were regional payments, from one to five million. And some other little crumbs on top. A widow’s pension of 11,530 rubles if he was killed in the line of duty. And there were monthly payments for widows, too. And all kinds of benefits besides. It was some kind of gold mine. Just keep raking it in.

Ulyana got up and went to the bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself in surprise. Who was she? She slapped herself—maybe to wake herself with the pain, maybe to feel alive through the pain, maybe to punish herself. But it didn’t hurt.

She just didn’t want to share with me, Ulyana told herself.

Tatyana Nikolayevna. She just didn’t want to share with me. That was the whole thing. She’d probably looked up those numbers long ago. I was the superstitious fool who was afraid to look. But she’s a hard woman. That’s why she won’t let me into the family, not because I was working in some whorehouse… Those are all excuses. She just spat poison at me to paralyze me.

And really, had Ulyana asked for anything she wasn’t entitled to? Was she coveting what belonged to someone else?

No. She’d only wanted what was fair. Only what was legal.

What she was entitled to. Her share.

An equal share.

She relieved herself, washed her face, and went back. She tossed and turned all night, falling asleep only toward dawn. The red moon kept her awake.