Part One: Why He Left
The debts had accumulated the way debts do when a small business fails — not all at once, not in a single catastrophic moment, but gradually, each month a little worse than the previous, each payment a little harder to make, until the weight of them was simply too large for the available ground to hold.
Aleksei Dorin had run a small construction supply company for seven years. It had been good for most of those years — not spectacular, not the kind of success that produces interviews or profiles, but the steady, reliable good of a business that serves its community and pays its people and provides its owner with enough to live on and occasionally a little more. He had built it from almost nothing, in the way that certain people build things: methodically, without drama, with the specific patience of someone who understands that worthwhile things take time.
The failure had come from several directions at once, which is the nature of certain failures — one bad contract, then a supplier who disappeared with a deposit, then a market shift that made his primary product suddenly less necessary, then two months of illness that took him out of the operation at a moment when the operation could not absorb his absence. Each of these things would have been survivable individually. Together they had broken something that could not be repaired with the resources available to him at home.
His daughter Masha was seven when he left.
She was the daughter of his first marriage — his wife Nadya had died when Masha was three, quietly and suddenly, the kind of death that leaves the living in the specific bewilderment of something that should have had warning and didn’t. He had raised Masha alone for two years and had been, he thought, doing adequately — the way single parents doing their best in difficult circumstances do adequately, which is to say not perfectly but genuinely, with the whole of what they have.
He had met Vera eighteen months after Nadya died. She was warm, or she presented as warm, and she was good with Masha, or she presented as good with Masha, and Aleksei had been a man who was tired and grieving and who had a young daughter who needed a mother and who had, in his tiredness and grief, perhaps not looked as carefully as he should have at the difference between the presentation of a thing and the thing itself.
They had married. She had moved into the apartment.
Before leaving, when the debts had made it clear that the only available option was to go somewhere that would pay him enough to clear them, he had done something that his lawyer had suggested and that had cost him three months of a payment he had to borrow but that he had understood immediately as the right thing: he had transferred the apartment to Masha’s name. A clean transfer, properly documented, registered with the appropriate authority. The apartment — the apartment his parents had lived in, that he had grown up in, that he had inherited and had Nadya’s presence in every room — was legally Masha’s.
Whatever happened, she would have a home.
The day he left, Masha had held onto him at the entrance to the apartment and had not let go until he gently, carefully, unwound her arms from around him and crouched down to her level and looked at her and said: “I’m coming back. Everything I earn, I’m earning for you. You know that.”
She had nodded. She had the specific nod of a seven-year-old who believes their parent completely, which is the nod that is hardest to receive when you are the parent who is leaving.
He had looked at Vera, who had smiled and said the things that people say at departures: we’ll be fine, don’t worry, take care of yourself.
He had looked at his mother, who had come to say goodbye and who had said very little, which was her way when she had things she didn’t know how to say.
He had left.
