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“I’m sorry.”

He says it plainly, without any of the tilted-head sympathy people usually put on. I like that he doesn’t make a show of it.

“I don’t remember much else about her,” I admit. “Her hands, a bit. She always had warm hands. And she smelled like honey because she was always making medovik for somebody. And when I had nightmares, she’d sit on the end of my bed and hum until I went back to sleep. I never felt scared when she was in the house.”

I stop. My throat’s gone tight. I didn’t mean to say this much.

“The house never felt like that again,” I say. “After. Papa tried. He just... didn’t know how. He knew how to protect us. He didn’t know how to make it feel safe.”

“Those aren’t the same thing,” Caleb says quietly.

“No. They’re not.”

I get up, because I need something to do with my hands. I go to the fridge and take out the medovik, peel back the plastic wrap, and cut two slices. The layers are perfect. Twelve of them, soft and golden, with the cream soaked all the way through.

I put one in front of him.

“You said I wasn’t allowed to see this,” he says.

“It’s ready now,” I say, simply.

“I don’t eat sweet things.”

“You ate the apple cake.”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he picks up his fork and eats a mouthful. He chews slowly, and his eyes close for just a second, the way Arina’s do when she tastes good wine.

“This was your mother’s recipe,” he says.

I nod.

“What do you want, Galana?”

He asked me that yesterday. In Papa’s living room, with my sisters all around us. I gave him an answer then, and it was true, but it wasn’t the whole thing.

I sit back down across from him. I look at my hands.

“It’s stupid,” I say.

“Tell me anyway.”

“It’s not a real ambition. Arina’s going to run Papa’s business. Zhenya’s going to be a lawyer, or a supervillain, depending on the day. Eva volunteers. Milana’s going to do something amazing the second she decides what it is.” I swallow. “I just want a family. My own. Kids, a kitchen, a house that’s loud. Somewhere people feel safe when they walk in the door.”

My face is burning. I wait for him to laugh, or worse, to be mean about it.

“That’s not stupid,” he says.

I look up.

He’s put his fork down. He’s looking at me with those pale lake-water eyes, and there’s nothing in them that looks like pity, or amusement, or any of the things I braced for.

“It’s the hardest thing anyone in this house could want,” he says. “Most people in our world can’t build that. They don’t know how. They buy a big house and fill it with guns and call it safe.” He leans forward. “You already know how to do it. I watched you do it yesterday, for four people who didn’t even notice.”

I can’t breathe properly.

“Caleb...”

He stands up. He comes around the table, slowly, the way you’d approach something you don’t want to frighten. And I stand up too, without meaning to, until there’s barely a foot of kitchen tile between us.