The Killing Method

I hadn’t slept in two days. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him again. At first, his cold, lifeless body on the hospital bed. Gray. Then, a little brighter. My memory brought back our arguments and the evenings we spent playing some strategy board game, drinking a liter of beer each and arguing over the best move. Then came the rare fights and all my teenage bullshit that had seemed so terribly important at the time. His advice—kind, but strict. And then deeper still, all the way back to childhood. Smiles. Warm hands on my shoulders. The happier the memories were, the more tears rolled down my already tear-streaked face.

Morning was breaking outside. A ray of May sunlight slipped through the curtains and hit me straight in the eyes. I blinked, and the last of the moisture disappeared.

“So this is it,” I whispered, not even realizing I’d spoken aloud.

Today was the funeral of the person closest to me: the man who had brought me into this world and taught me how to get by in it. My father. Sergey Vladimirovich Belyakov.

It wasn’t as if his death had come out of nowhere. Over the past few months, Dad had been in and out of the hospital more and more often. The doctors talked about his heart, stress, overwork. He brushed them off. Kept insisting everything was under control. As if that control had ever existed. But no matter how much time you had to prepare, when it actually happened, there was no such thing as being ready.

I was only twenty-four.

I needed my father.

I slowly sat up in bed and straightened my shoulders. Deep breath in, slow breath out, and I could try standing. The lack of sleep made itself known immediately—my head spun like the lights inside a kaleidoscope. As badly as I wanted to stay in my refuge, not showing up to the funeral would’ve been an insult to his memory. A betrayal. Today I would see him for the last time, and then I’d go to a bar and get shitfaced—and hopefully, finally, manage to sleep.

A car pulled up outside the house. I really didn’t want to get in. I didn’t want anything at all. Not even to die. At least not yet.

People usually turned to those closest to them for support—and I didn’t have anyone like that anymore. The woman in the car apparently thought otherwise.

I opened the door and got in. The inside smelled like her perfume—sweet and far too alive for a day like this. My mother’s eyes immediately swept over me from head to toe, scrutinizing every detail.

“You look awful.”

I ran a hand over my cheek. The stubble scratched against my palm.

“No shit.”

She, on the other hand, looked flawless, as always—as though she were heading to a gala instead of a funeral. Hair styled into perfect waves, a beautiful fitted dress, and heels, of course. You’d have had a hard time believing she was older than thirty-eight, but in reality she was a decade older.

“My father died, in case you forgot.”

Her lips tightened.

“I lost him too.”

I gave a humorless laugh.

“The only thing you lost was your conscience.”

She tensed.

“Misha, not now.”

“When, then?”

The car went quiet.

“It wasn’t like that,” she said evenly.

What a fucking bitch. She had “lost” him four years ago, when she decided to fuck some asshole from work. I wasn’t the kind of person who saw everything in black and white. I knew the world didn’t work that way. But there was still a line you didn’t cross. If you stopped loving someone, then find the courage to end the relationship. After that, fine—go fuck whoever you want.

“What happened, then? You tripped and accidentally landed on someone’s dick?”

She exhaled sharply.

“Your father and I had been growing apart for a long time.”

“Did he know that?”

Silence.

I turned toward the window.

She hadn’t seen him sitting in the kitchen at night with his pills and paperwork. She hadn’t heard how heavily he breathed in his sleep. She didn’t know that one day he’d told me, “Don’t repeat my mistakes.”

She was already living her new life.

“Do you still think I’m the reason he got sick?” she asked quietly.

We drove in silence for several minutes. I didn’t answer. Of course it wasn’t her fault. Her affair hadn’t made him sick. But I desperately needed someone to hate. It made breathing easier.

The only sounds were the clicking of the turn signal and the steady hum of the engine. I wanted to open the door while the car was moving and get out. Not out of the car—out of this conversation. Although maybe out of the car too.

“I came because you’re my son,” she finally said.

Son.

What a convenient word.

The problem was, she had stopped being my mother four years ago. The day Dad threw her out of the house, she didn’t just leave him. She left me too. At first, there were occasional messages. Then silence. A long silence.

And now that I was the sole heir to the company and everything he had built, she was suddenly here again.

Coincidence.

Of course.

“Today, I just don’t want you to be alone.”

I turned back to the window.

Too late.

The funeral service was unbearable. Inside the tiny church, the priest kept pacing back and forth, swinging the censer. The movement made my head spin, and the smell of incense made me nauseous on top of it. There weren’t many people, but somehow the place was suffocatingly hot. I tried to focus on anything at all just to keep myself from passing out. My gaze drifted over the guests, and I barely recognized anyone: business partners, employees, a couple of distant relatives. Dad hadn’t had many friends. When you ran a successful business, you learned pretty quickly how few genuinely decent people there were in the world. Same reason I didn’t have friends either. I had no use for friendship bought with money.

The priest’s words pulled me out of my thoughts.

“It is time to say farewell to the departed. Let the family come forward first.”

I walked toward the coffin on legs that barely wanted to bend. Dad didn’t even look like himself. Some kind of wax figure. I couldn’t fully understand what I was feeling. Hundreds of things I’d never said sat on the tip of my tongue. So many versions of a possible future flashed before my eyes. There were no tears left, but pain clamped around my chest like a vise.

I crossed myself and placed a hand over my father’s chest.

“Thank you for being with me all this time, but it never would’ve been enough.” I choked back a sob and continued. “I love you, Dad.”

Everything after that passed in a blur. People saying goodbye, the hearse, the burial, flowers. A fucking mountain of flowers—and me. And Dad. Dad was gone.

By five in the afternoon, I was sitting in a bar. Some random place—it didn’t matter where I got drunk. I’d skipped the memorial meal. Let my mother handle at least one thing if she was so desperate to show how much she “cared.” I found the table farthest from everyone else, wedged myself into the corner, and ordered fifteen shots of vodka and a lemon.

The alcohol burned pleasantly down my throat, spreading warmth through me. Before the sting could fade, I knocked back the second shot, then the third, then the fourth, and only then reached for a slice of lemon. It hit me fast. No surprise there: I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d eaten anything besides that miserable lemon.

Getting shitfaced was the plan, but passing out in this dump wasn’t. So I took a break, and my thoughts inevitably returned to Dad.

It hurt.

It hurt so fucking much. Would it ever go away?

It felt as though someone had switched off every light in the world at once and the sun would never rise again. There was a mountain of things that needed doing, but I had neither the strength nor the desire to touch any of them. I knew Dad would’ve wanted me to live—to grieve for him, sure, but not for long, and then keep living. But he was gone. He didn’t want anything anymore, and he never would again.

I reached for another shot just as the chair across from me scraped backward. A tall, middle-aged man slowly sat down at my table.

“Anyone sitting here?”