Page 46 of Scarlet Thorns
“If you need anything—” Jason starts, but I’ve already hung up.
I sit in that plastic chair, surrounded by the controlled chaos of a hospital emergency department, and let the full weight of loss crash over me. Dad is dead, Mom is being treated for alcohol poisoning, and I’m completely, utterly alone for the first time in my life.
The warm glow my day started with feels like a distant memory. But the slip of paper in my jewelry box feels like a lifeline now— a connection to someone who made me feel alive, powerful, desired. Someone who saw me as worth touching, worth claiming, worth remembering.
I need that feeling again. Need to remember that I’m more than this grief, more than the daughter of a dead man and a traumatized woman. I need to feel like I matter to someone, even if that someone is a stranger whose name I don’t know.
But first, I have to survive this. Have to figure out how to keep breathing in a world without my father in it.
Have to find a way to live with the possibility that everything I thought I knew about the man who raised me might have been a lie.
Chapter Eighteen
Ilona
The antiseptic smell burns my nostrils as I watch my mother’s chest rise and fall beneath thin hospital blankets.
I’ve been here sixteen hours straight, my body folded into this uncomfortable chair that’s probably seen more vigils than anyone should have to keep. The fluorescent lights overhead cast everything in harsh, unforgiving tones that make Mom look smaller than I’ve ever seen her.
Fragile. Breakable. Human in ways I never wanted to acknowledge.
My eyes burn from exhaustion, but I can’t sleep. Can’t close them without seeing Dad’s face the last time we spoke, the way he held me just a beat too long when I left his house. Like he was memorizing the moment. Like he already knew.
How did I miss it? How did I not see that he was drowning?
The machines around Mom’s bed beep with a steady rhythm, monitoring vitals that crashed when the news hit her. When the police called to say they’d found Igor Shiradze’s body. When suicide became the word that shattered what was left of our family into pieces too small to ever put back together.
Suicide.
The word tastes like bitter disbelief. Dad wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t. Not the man who taught me that problems have solutions, that hope exists even in the darkest moments, that family means never giving up on each other.
But maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought.
Mom’s eyelids flutter, consciousness swimming back to the surface through whatever cocktail of sedatives they’ve givenher. I lean forward, my spine protesting after hours in this position, and watch her focus slowly on my face.
“Ilona?” Her voice is sandpaper rough, cracked from crying and screaming and the kind of grief that tears your throat raw.
“I’m here, Mom.” I reach for her hand, surprised by how cold her fingers feel. “How are you feeling?”
She blinks slowly, reality settling over her features like a heavy blanket. For a moment, I see hope flicker in her eyes— the desperate wish that this might all be a nightmare, that she’ll wake up to find Dad making coffee in their kitchen and complaining about the morning news.
Then memory crashes back, and her face crumples.
“The police,” she whispers, each word carefully formed like she’s afraid they might shatter if she speaks too fast. “They said… they said your father is dead. That it looks like suicide.”
Even though I know this— even though I’ve been sitting with this knowledge for sixteen endless hours— hearing it spoken aloud by my mother’s broken voice hits like a physical blow. My chest constricts, making it hard to breathe, hard to think beyond the roaring in my ears.
“I don’t believe it,” Mom continues, her grip on my hand tightening until her nails dig into my palm. “Why would he take his own life? It doesn’t make sense. Your father would never… he would never leave us like this.”
The tears start again, silent this time, tracking down her cheeks like she’s already cried herself empty but her body hasn’t gotten the message yet. I want to comfort her, want to tell her she’s right, that there must be some mistake. But the words stick in my throat because I heard the same certainty in my own voice when Jason first told me, and certainty didn’t change anything.
“Why would he commit suicide?” I whisper, voicing the question that’s been eating me alive since yesterday. “It’s not like Dad.”
“I don’t know, darling.” Mom’s voice breaks on the endearment, the same one Dad used to call me. “But then again... he’s been different lately. Not like his usual self.”
Different.
The word unlocks memories I’ve been trying to ignore— Dad’s distraction during our last conversation, the way he avoided eye contact when I asked about their financial situation, the exhaustion that seemed to weigh him down like he was carrying invisible stones.
