The last to arrive were Alexander’s parents, and his brother Mikhail with his fiancée, Natalya. We almost had dinner ready and were setting up a huge solid wood table in the dining room when Mikhail appeared in the hall and shouted in Russian to get his brother’s attention. A different kind of air shifted in the scene when Alexander went to receive them, even more so when Illya and Ekaterina Valinchenko entered, with the other young woman.
It was clearly perceptible. Everything stopped, even (perhaps) time.
I was at the back of it all, arranging napkins, when the silence caught my attention and my heart sank the moment my eyes found the proud figure of the leader of the entire species. He was an older man—that much I already knew from photos—but in person he looked younger than his seven
