I rented a small room above an old garage on the east side of town. The landlord was a retired electrician named Tomasz who charged me less than market rate because the space had no proper kitchen—just a hot plate and a mini-fridge wedged into a corner—and the heating was unreliable in ways that required constant negotiation with a radiator older than I was. A narrow window faced the alley. The walls were peeling in places where moisture had worked its way through from the roof. The bed creaked when you shifted your weight, and the floorboards announced every step with the enthusiasm of a percussion section that didn’t know the song was over.

It was not a place anyone would choose to die. But it was a place where someone would know your name.

I moved Grigori in on a Tuesday. He sat on the edge of the bed while I arranged his medications on the small table I’d bought from a secondhand shop—the same precise order from the laminated card, which I’d brought from the house along with his blanket, his reading glasses, and the photograph of his wife that had sat on his nightstand for thirty years.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.“I know.”“Viktor will be angry.”“Viktor is already angry. He’s been angry since before you got sick. Your illness just gave him permission to show it.”
Grigori looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Then he nodded, slowly, the way people nod when they’ve been handed a truth they already possessed but hadn’t yet spoken aloud.

I worked two jobs. During the day, I stood behind the counter at a pharmacy—the irony of which was not lost on me—ringing up medications for strangers while my father-in-law waited in a rented room for the medications I’d pick up on my way home. At night, after I’d fed Grigori and helped him to bed and sat with him until his breathing steadied into sleep, I opened my laptop and took online translation orders. Russian to English, English to Russian, occasionally French when the client was willing to wait for accuracy over speed. The money went toward medicine, treatments, a weekend caregiver named Darya who had the kind of calm competence that made you trust her the moment she walked in, and groceries that I bought in the specific quantities that Grigori’s diminishing appetite could manage.