Three Letters

The town did not look like it had been holding its breath for her return; it looked, instead, as if it had been carrying on without apology. Streets she remembered by smell and sound—the bakery with its steady warm breath at dawn, the bus stop whose bench had a permanent dent where boys had once sat to trade secrets—kept going on. The houses were lower than she had pictured, their roofs more patched than painted, and the river still ran brown with the same indifferent current. Anna had not lived here for eighteen years. She had left with the belief that places could not hold the weight of decisions if you were careful enough to step out of them. The choice to come back felt at once inevitable and like a betrayal of everything she had built in the city: a caseload, a furnished flat, a calendar organized down to the hour for meetings and meals. This return was not a vacation. It was a summons.

Nikolai’s house sat at the end of a lane behind a hedge that had once been trimmed into neat angles but had softened with neglect. A faded wreath hung on the door like an apology. She unlocked it with a key that fit because she had used it last winter, or the winter before; memory kept its own stubborn ledger. Inside, the air carried the scent of boiled cabbage and soap, a familiar domesticity she found both comforting and invasive. Photographs lined the mantel: younger faces, a wedding, a school portrait that made Anna flinch—a snapshot of a past version of her father who had been energetic, upright, and certain. Now his certainty had thinned to the size of daily routines.

She found him in the kitchen, sitting at the small table, wearing a cardigan he thought dignified. His hands were folded as if in prayer, though pride sat in his posture more insistently than faith. Nikolai looked up and smiled with practice. The smile did not reach his eyes the way it used to. He had aged into patience and small jokes that slipped like pebbles into conversation. ‘‘You look like you have city dust on you,’’ he said, and Anna smiled because it was exactly the kind of comment he would make.

Olga arrived with the late light cutting across her hair. She moved with steady purpose—someone who had stayed to steward a household, to hold the geography of the town in her mind. The three of them assembled at the table and ate with the politeness of people who had last spoken about ordinary things. Anna watched her sister’s hands: callused at the base of the fingers where gardening tools had pressed, the cuticle nick at the thumb from a knife that did not get sharpened enough. There was a quiet between the siblings that used to be filled with childhood stories and small cruelties; now it was filled with something else, an awareness of responsibility and years that had rearranged loyalties.

They exchanged updates about neighbors and weather, and the conversation slid into the old grooves—town council meetings, the debt on the bakery, whether the bus route would survive the next municipal budget. The talk carried the safety of routine. But when Anna asked about Nikolai’s health in a direct way, the room tightened. He said the honest things one said now: dizzy spells, visits to a doctor who recommended rest, pills whose names he could scarcely recall. There was an evasion at work when her questions grew more precise. Olga watched her father with a protective defensiveness that Anna remembered from adolescence: it was not only love; it was fear of exposure.