Chapter 128: Can You Forgive
The suite Polina had stormed back to felt less like a sanctuary and more like a gilded cage. She’d slammed the door on Isaak’s pleading, on the muffled sounds of the staff clearing away the last evidence of the party downstairs. Now, hours later, the silence was worse.
She stood at her window, the same view Beth had faced the night before. The sea was a restless, bruised purple under the gathering dusk. Disowned. The word reverberated in her skull, a cold, legalistic term that didn’t belong between cousins who’d shared bunk beds and stolen their first cigarette together behind the oleander bushes.
But it fit. It fit the icy finality in Beth’s eyes, the way she had simply… turned off. Like Polina had become a portrait on the wall, of historical interest only.
The door clicked open. Isaak didn’t ask for permission. He entered, looking rumpled and younger than his thirty-five years, carrying two cut-crystal tumblers of amber liquid. He set one on the vanity beside her without a word.
“She meant it,” Polina said, her voice raspy from disuse.
“Yeah.” Isaak took a long drink. “She’s never said it before. Not even when we were teens and you put a garden snake in her overnight bag.”
A ghost of a smile touched Polina’s lips, vanished. “She screamed for ten minutes straight.”
“Then she drowned it in the pool and never mentioned it again.” Isaak swirled the ice in his glass. “This is different. This isn’t a snake.”
Polina turned from the window, the weight of her own words from the balcony—traitor, pathetic—sitting in her stomach like lead. “What do we actually know about it? About their lives after Aunt Elena… after she was taken?”
The question hung in the perfumed air. They’d been so enmeshed in their own shattering loss. Elena had been their sun: brilliant, dangerous, warm. Her arrest had been an astronomical event, tilting their world off its axis. They’d orbited their own grief.
“Mom sent money,” Isaak said quietly, a defensive note creeping in. “Legal teams. Everything they needed.”
“We sent birthday cards,” Polina countered, the realization sour. “From Saint-Tropez. With drawings of the beach.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “What did they need, Isaak? What did thirteen-year-old Beth need, whose father was just buried and whose mother was now in a maximum-security cell in Colorado?”
The silence that followed was answer enough. They didn’t know. They’d never asked.
“And Dove,” Isaak whispered, the name a punch of guilt. “Christ. Dove was ten.”
Polina saw her then, not the formidable ranch foreman in work boots they’d greeted two days prior, but a small, fierce child with those same green eyes, standing between a grieving sister and a world that had just swallowed her parents whole. Alone on that huge Texas ranch with just the staff and the ghosts and the unspoken family business lurking in the shadows.
“We weren’t there,” Polina stated, the truth finally undeniable. It wasn’t about blame now; it was about geography, emotional and physical. “We were here, drowning. And they were there, learning to swim in a different ocean. A darker one.”
Isaak drained his glass, set it down with a sharp crack. “Dad’s partnership with Samuel… it was transactional. Clean. But what Beth told him today… she’s not just continuing it. She’s stepping into Samuel’s shoes. The full measure. The ledgers, the… solutions.” He looked at his sister, fear in his eyes. “That’s not a business you dabble in. That’s a life sentence. And she chose it.”
“Because she had to,” Polina realized aloud. “Because someone had to, and Dove was a child. Beth would have seen it as her duty. Her inheritance.” She picked up her own untouched drink, let the cool glass anchor her. “And we called her a traitor for finding a sliver of happiness with the man she loves. For building something clean for herself on top of all that.”
The shame was a physical heat now, crawling up her neck. Her anger, which had felt so righteous and sharp on the balcony, now looked petulant in the cold light of this new understanding. It wasn’t about Damien, not really. It was about their own unaddressed loss, their jealousy that Beth had managed to construct a life—a hard, complicated, morally ambiguous life—while they had merely stewed in the family’s grand manor.
“I went too far,” she said, the admission leaving her lungs empty.
“We both did.” Isaak sighed, a long, weary sound. “Dad’s furious with us. Not theatrically, quietly. Which is worse. He said the alliance stands. That Beth is more Elena and Samuel combined than we ever appreciated. He said we acted like children.”
“We did.” Polina finally took a sip, the whiskey burning a clean path down her throat. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know if we can fix it. You can’t unsay ‘disown.’ But maybe…” He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe we start by not making it worse. By acknowledging we weren’t there. That we have no idea what their last twenty years actually cost.”
Polina looked back out at the darkening sea. Somewhere below, Beth was probably in her own suite, perhaps with Damien, planning a return to Texas, to the ranch, to the weight she had just officially claimed. She wasn’t thinking of them. That was the cruelest cut. Polina’s dramatic rejection was likely already a minor footnote in Beth’s strategic planning.
“We stay for the rest of the week,” Polina decided, her voice firmer. “We don’t hide. We don’t force a conversation. We just… be present. Without the poison.”
“And if she never looks at us again?” Isaak asked.
“Then we live with that.” Polina turned, meeting her brother’s gaze. “It would be less than they’ve had to live with.”
Downstairs, a car door shut. Through the window, they saw the sleek rental sedan’s interior light flash on as Damien got out, holding two large paper bags that smelled, even from this distance, of garlic and herbs. He’d gone into town, fetched dinner. A simple, domestic task. He looked up at the lit windows of the manor, his expression unreadable, then headed inside.
Watching him, Polina felt the last of her old resentment dissolve, replaced by a hollow, aching regret. He was just a man who loved a complicated woman. A man who, like them, was trying to navigate the minefield of this family. He’d chosen to stand in it with her.
“We start tomorrow,” she said, more to herself than to Isaak.
The night settled in, deep and star-strewn over the Mediterranean. In her room, Beth unpacked the food containers Damien brought, the mundane aroma of roasted chicken and potatoes cutting through the room’s tension. She didn’t mention Dimitri. She didn’t mention Polina.
“Smells like that little place near the port,” she said, forcing a lightness into her tone.
“It is,” he said, watching her carefully. “You okay?”
“Long day,” she offered, which was enough for him. He knew the scales of her silences.
Across the hall, Polina lay awake, staring at the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling, listening to the ancient house settle. For the first time, she heard not the whispers of old secrets, but the overwhelming, deafening sound of absence—the decades of conversations not had, support not offered, family not forged.
It was a poor time for clarity, but it had come anyway, sharp and uninvited. She closed her eyes, and the face she saw wasn’t Beth’s cold mask from the balcony. It was a younger Beth, age thirteen, standing at a Texas grave under a pitiless sun, with a little sister’s hand clasped tightly in her own, utterly alone.
And Polina finally understood what they had done.