Page 80 of Ruthless Sin
I am already sure.
17
MILA
I’m dreaming.
No concrete, no bulb, no hand on the back of my neck, no Alexei.
A kitchen.
Yelena is at the counter. She’s singing.
She has her back to me.
She’s wearing the yellow dress. The one with the white buttons down the back. Mama used to fasten them for her before church.
Her voice is the voice I haven’t heard since Papa was alive.
She’s singing Tonkaya Ryabina.
I’m at the doorway. Barefoot. The floor of our old house. Cold tile. The grout I used to trace with my finger while Mama cooked. Sunday-morning light, Moscow, the kitchen we had when Papa was still coming home.
Yelena is humming the bar between the second verse and the third. The bar Sofia hummed back to me in the music room.
I open my mouth to say her name.
I can’t.
My throat won’t work. The air locks up. I try again. Nothing.
I try to walk into the kitchen.
I can’t.
There’s something between me and the doorway. I can’t see what it is. Glass maybe. Or air that’s gone solid. I push against it with both hands. My hands go through. My hands don’t reach her.
I push harder.
Nothing.
Yelena turns her head.
She doesn’t see me. Her eyes are on someone past me. Someone shorter than her. Someone to her left. She smiles. The smile she had when I was small. Patient. Warm.
She goes back to singing.
I bang on the invisible wall between us.
Her shoulders don’t so much as shift.
I scream her name.
No sound comes out.
I wake up.
The comforter is on the floor and my hair is damp at the hairline and my breath is coming in fragments the way it does when I’ve learned to wake silent. The chain cold at my throat, the sheet damp under my shoulders, my hands fisted so hard in the fabric my knuckles ache. I lie on my back. My heart is slamming against my ribs.
