Page 211 of Sexting the Pakhan

“The bad man took me,” she says. “From the window. He said I had to be quiet or Nadia would wake up.”

The world tilts.

I close my eyes for half a second, because if I picture it too clearly, I will lose my mind.

“Where is Ruslan?” I ask.

Her face crumples.

That’s the answer before she says anything.

“He came,” she whispers. “Papa came.”

Papa.

The word is small, wet, trembling, and it breaks something deep inside me, but I have no space for that pain yet.

“He told me to run,” she says. “There were very scary men there.”

My heart throbs faster. “What men?”

“I-I don’t know,” she hiccups. “There were so many of them.”

My hands tighten around her. “Where is he now?”

Mila looks over her shoulder toward the trees. When she speaks, her voice is barely there.

“He fell.”

I can’t move. For one second, I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t be a mother, can’t be anything except a woman standing in the wet dawn while her daughter tells her the man she loves fell.

Then Nadia’s voice comes from behind me.

“Mama?”

I turn and see her near the edge of the yard, barefoot too, crying silently with her blanket still clutched in one hand.

“Go back inside,” I tell her, but she shakes her head before I finish.

“No.”

There’s no time to argue. There’s no safe place anymore. I take Mila’s hand and reach back for Nadia with the other.

“Show me,” I say.

Mila doesn’t want to, I can see that, but she turns anyway and leads us back through the trees. She keeps looking at me, like she’s trying to make sure I’m still there, and every few steps she says things in broken pieces.

“He told me not to look back.”

“He hit the bad man.”

“Papa was bleeding.”

Each sentence lands inside me like a stone.

The trees thin out, and the ground starts to rise. I smell rain before the first drop touches my face. The path opens suddenly, and the old quarry appears in front of us, dark and wide and terrible beneath the morning sky.

The ledge is empty.