FATHERPOV: HazelMy mother said it the way she said most hard things, quietly, with the particular flatness of someone who had been carrying a piece of information for so long it had stopped feeling like a bomb and started feeling like furniture. Just something that lived in the room with her. Just a thing she had always known was going to have to be said eventually.I sat down on the floor of Nikolai's room.Not the bed, not the chair. The floor, because my legs made the decision and the floor was what was available."Tell me," I said.She was quiet for a moment."Your father worked for Reeve," she said. "Before you were born and for six years after. He was not a bad man. I want you to understand that first. He was a man who got into something that grew past what he could manage and by the time he understood what Reeve actually was, he was already in deep enough that getting out had a cost.""What cost," I said."Us," she said. "Reeve told him that if he stayed, we were safe. If he
Last Updated : 2026-04-19 Read more