5.
Dewy blades of grass kissed Vera’s calves as she walked along the side of the lake. The rhythmic plunk, plunk, plunk of a sledgehammer banging a fence stake into the ground greeted her before even her father did. Demyan, fully focused on his task, didn’t notice Vera until she was standing just a few feet away.
He tossed the tool in his hand, hammer down, against his most recent post. Over the course of only a couple of days, the fence line of natural wood posts had started to take form along the edge of the lake. They had the entire line of the lake, a good two hundred feet around the house, finished with single standing posts. What good the fence would do to keep someone out of the lake, should it need to, she didn’t know. It did, however, give the landscape a homey, country appeal. She couldn’t deny that.
“Where’s your friend this morning?” she asked her father.
“Who’d know?” he muttered back.
She didn’t press the issue.
The morning before, Vera hadn’t even bothered to make her way out to speak to Vaslav when he came riding down on the ROV. If the man couldn’t at least talk out his issues, then she wouldn’t waste time trying to pry the details from him.
Besides, what was different?
Vaslav had been mean before.
This hadn’t even hurt.
It was more than a little amusing to see Demyan wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his silk sleeve. What he came with, he had, apparently. Nothing more, and nothing less. He didn’t exactly pack the type of clothing he’d need to do hard labor, like pounding in fence posts from five until eight in the morning, but that didn’t exactly stop him, either.
Even in slacks, that desperately needed an iron, and a silk button down that would likely soon find a garbage can, Demyan found something to do.
Resting his arms over the top of the fence post, Demyan squinted one eye at his daughter where she stood in her borrowed hiking boots, wrapped tightly in an over-sized cardigan that Kiril had provided along with a bag of other clothes. “You’re up early.”
“Is it?”
“Barely seven,” her father replied.
Vera nodded, accepting his account of the time for what it was, but not able to confirm it other than the early chirp of birds in the trees and the cold mist clinging to the top of the lake’s surface. Given the sun wasn’t even high enough in the sky to warm the air, though, she knew he wasn’t lying.
“Someone should be running down breakfast soon, then,” she said. Thankfully, Demyan had learned how to run the generator system so she woke up to power and running water unlike the morning before. “Did you meet Mira yet, properly?”
“The first night. I wasn’t entirely right, to be fair, so there’s not much to tell.”
Vera chewed on her bottom lip, mumbling, “Oh.”
“Didn’t seem like much of a talker.”
“She’s ... it takes a bit, and she’s very loyal to Vaslav so if he’s even the slightest bit uncomfortable, then she usually is, too. Like most everyone else around him,” Vera added.
Although, she instantly regretted giving away as much information about Vaslav’s moods and how it affected the people in his life. Just because she noticed those sorts of things didn’t mean that he would want Vera sharing them.
“But that’s not important,” she told her father quickly.
Demyan shrugged. “I suppose.”
The borderline safe conversation didn’t exactly leave Vera feeling fulfilled, but it wasn’t anything new between the two.
“Are you ever going to come back home?” Demyan asked.
She hadn’t been ready for it.
Vera stumbled over a weak deflection. “I mean, when did I really have time ... not to mention, it’s not like right now is a great time to plan something like that.”
“I didn’t ask why.”
Yeah.
God.
Vera stopped avoiding her father’s gaze, and settled on telling him the truth. “It never really felt like home, Papa. I was so focused on being something that I didn’t really learn to enjoy where I was and what I had.”
“You’re saying you didn’t have anything to miss? You don’t miss us ... do you not want us?”
She flinched. “It’s not like that.”
“It sounds like that.”
Her heavy sigh quieted Demyan from saying anything more.
She was also busy.
Not that Vera wanted to repeat that excuse to her father, but it was still true. From the time she was sixteen until the day she was forced to retire from being a professional ballerina, she didn’t stop. Ballet had taken nearly every second of her life, and what time she did have to grow and be a person of her own making, she hadn’t wasted it flying between countries because there were people she left behind who missed her.
Was it selfish?
Fine.
She didn’t regret it.
“I grew up and learned a lot about who I was and wanted to be because I wasn’t at home,” Vera said. “I had a different kind of influence shaping my perspective. And that’s not a bad thing, but it didn’t have anything to do with you, or Claire ... anybody, really.”
“Before or after your injury?” Demyan shot back.
“That’s not fair,” Vera whispered, blinking back the sudden sting of tears welling in her eyes, “you don’t know what that was like for me. Especially after it happened. To be—”
“You didn’t let us, either.”
“Wasn’t it bad enough for me to be a failure to myself? Why did I have to go home to be one, too?” she asked, every word getting progressively higher and shriller.
She didn’t want to yell, or argue, or do any of this at all.
“You know what, I already told you what matters here, I’m where I want to be,” Vera said, and the declaration loosened her father’s tight shoulders. “Do we really have to do this?”
“Just because you can make choices doesn’t mean I have to like them.”
“But you don’t get a say in them, either, Papa.”
Demyan nodded once, and then waved a hand at the quiet scenery around them. “Yeah, tell me about it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Can’t say I had any choice once I got here, can we?” he asked.
“To be fair, neither did I.”
“The bigger issue with that is how you don’t seem to have a problem with it,” Demyan pointed out.
Vera lifted an eyebrow high. “Maybe that’s because a part of me likes it.”
“Vera.”
“And him,” she added, ignoring her father’s warning. “I also like him.” A lot, she thought. “So maybe if you have something to say about that, now’s the time to do it and move on with it.”
“Would you even hear me say it? Would you let me, as your father, say it?”
Did he want honesty?
Vera gave it, anyway. “I didn’t ask you to love him, you’re not the one who has to.”
Demyan didn’t push the line she drew in the sand with that statement, instead asking, “But do you? Do you love him?”
She refused to drop her father’s piercing stare when she replied only, “And I didn’t say you had to like him, either.”