Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

been sick for a while, but somehow in my mind I’d imagined him lingering on and on and on.

“It was just . . . my parents . . . Hipolit treated me . . .” Kaz shook his head, flooded with grief, not able to finish his thought. But I nodded, I understood. Hipolit was his mentor. Hipolit had taught him and cared for him and nurtured his talent even when his own parents had abandoned him.

I felt guilty now that my first reaction to the news had not been sadness, but a new, and familiar, worry about money. “Oh, Kaz,” I said gently. No matter that I was still angry with him, I cared for him, too.

Klara had taken the spoon from my hand while I was paying attention to Kaz, and she chose that moment to test it against the wood of the table, banging it, again, and again, and again, while babbling to herself.

Kaz pulled the spoon from her hands, abruptly, and her face turned, her eyes welled up with tears. Poland’s happiest baby turned, in an instant, into Poland’s saddest baby. Kaz’s mouth opened. “No, moje dziecko, don’t cry. Papa didn’t mean to upset you.”

He reached for her quickly, held her against his chest, until her tears stopped. Her heartbeat steadied against his heartbeat, and he kissed the top of her head, gently smoothed back her blond curls with his large fingers.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said to Klara, or Kaz, or to myself. And that was the thing about being a mother, it had made me into a liar. And a good one at that. I forced myself to smile. “Everything is going to be okay.”

PANI JEWNIEWICZ PUT OFF THE FUNERAL FOR A WEEK, UNTIL Leokadia could make it back from Berlin. The day was rainy and quite cold for April, and it was the first time I ever left Klara. Agata offered to sit with her at the apartment so Kaz and I could both attend the funeral. And though part of me did not want to go, did not want to see Leokadia, I thought about how she had traveled with me to Warsaw when Papa was dying, and I knew I had to be there.

“Marya.” She smiled when she saw me, reached out to hug me, then stopped herself, put her arms at her sides.

As much as I wanted to hate her, wanted to be angry with her still, seeing her again I remembered exactly why I loved her. I’d missed my friend, and now here she was, right in front of me. She wore a black dress, but it did not dim the brightness of her rosy cheeks, her piercing blue eyes, her beautiful blond curls swept back tightly in a bun. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said. I reached for her, awkwardly patting her shoulders.

She reached up and grabbed my hand, and she squeezed it. “Marya,” she said my name again. “Can we talk later? I have so much to say to you.”

I did not want to talk, did not want to hear whatever she had to say. But how could I refuse her at her father’s funeral?

“IT WAS ONLY ONE TIME,” SHE SAID TO ME LATER THAT AFTERNOON, repeating what Kaz had written. As if that made it hurt any less.

We had all left the gray and the gloom of the cemetery to return to a lavish feast at the Jewniewiczes’ apartment. Kaz had gone to look through the papers Hipolit had left in his study, and Leokadia cornered me and asked if I would join her out on the balcony. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still steel-colored, the air cool and damp. “Just once,” Leokadia repeated.

I pressed my lips tightly together, not sure how to respond. What were you supposed to say to a woman who you’d loved as a sister, who had betrayed you? I missed her, and I loved her still. And I hated her.

“I know that doesn’t make it any better, what I did,” Leokadia said. She walked to the edge of the balcony, leaned on the iron railing, and stared off at the smokestacks, the industry of Loksow, in the distance. “But I wanted you to know,” she said. “I made a terrible mistake, a horrible lapse in judgment. And it never happened again. I would never let it happen again.”

Part of me wanted to ask her exactly when it had happened, wanted to reimagine where I had been at the time and how I might have changed things if I had noticed more, paid attention more. What if I had not lost my own self in my grief? What if I had reached for Kaz when we were both hurting, instead of pulling away from him? The other part of me knew it didn’t matter. Nothing could change or undo what had happened now. There was always a choice, and they had both made one. Choices had consequences.

“Do you love him?” I asked her. I’d asked Kaz the same question once about her, and he’d denied he’d ever loved anyone but me. I still didn’t know if I believed him.

“He’s your husband,” Leokadia said, a nonanswer.

“But what if he wasn’t?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Marya,” she said. “I’ve missed you,” she added softly. “I wish I could just . . . take it back.”

“You can’t,” I said, matter-of-factly. She could no more take back her one night with Kaz than I could take back not getting on that train to Paris so many years ago and choosing to marry Kaz instead.

She nodded. “I know. But I would, if I could.”

Would I?

Now that I had Klara, I could not imagine any path, any choice, that would not lead me to her. And now that Kadi was in Berlin, living her dream, I wondered if she could truly regret any choice she had made that had led her there. “You are happy in Berlin?” I asked her.

She turned away from the railing, back to face me, her