Chapter Text
*~*~*~*~*
Alex sends Katya her phone number so they don’t have to use tumblr’s terrible messaging system. We should have done this years ago, she texts.
She asks Katya what building on Carleton’s campus she’s staying in, so she can come pick her up the next day. She says she’ll be there at ten, and texts Katya the make and model of her car so she will know it is her. And then, with the promise of an in-person meeting on the horizon, the conversation peters off.
The rest of Friday day passes in a sense of half-reality as Katya tries and fails to get ahead on her schoolwork and checks the text thread with Alex several more times, even though she knows nothing new has appeared. She takes a long shower and goes to bed early, like sleep will make the next day arrive quicker, but lies awake, not enough energy expended to make her tired.
She tosses in bed and tries to ignore her phone until finally, she falls asleep.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya cannot bring herself to sleep in on Saturday morning. She wakes early, and putters around her dorm room until it is time for Alex to arrive. She tries on three different outfits and spends too long on her eyeliner.
She feels oddly jittery. It occurs to her that throughout the weeks she’s been at Carleton, she’s been… friendly to her classmates. But it has been different than having a friend. The prospect of an unspecified amount of time spent in person with someone she’s never met, but who she knows intimately all the same, is somewhat daunting.
She’s standing outside her dorm building by 9:50 am.
At 9:57 am, a distinctly used-looking SUV rolls up to the curb. Stops. The engine shuts off.
Katya tries not to look expectant and has the distinct feeling that she fails miserably.
Alex steps out of the car.
The first thing Katya notices about her is that she is tall. Katya thinks she must be nearing 180 centimeters. She is broad, too, and fills out her Queen’s University hoodie in a way that makes Katya think she regularly works out. She has the kind of pale complexion that flushes easily and blotchily, even in the light chill of the October morning. She wears her brown hair in a single braid, practical. Her eyes are brown, and deep.
Looking at her, the word that comes to mind is plain, but not in an unkind way. Plain in the way a plain food can be comforting when you’re sick.
Alex stops on the curb and smiles. Shoves a hand in her pocket, her other hand playing idly with her car keys. She fixes Katya with those brown eyes, searching.
“Kat?” she says. It is odd, hearing her internet name said out loud like that.
Katya nods.
“Jesus,” Alex says, looking a little off balance. “You didn’t tell me you were hot.”
Katya immediately feels herself flush. All of her English falls right out of her head.
Alex’s cheeks grow redder and her eyes go wide.
“I mean,” she says, “hi. I meant to say hi. It’s nice to meet you.”
Katya can’t help the smile that bursts over her face. She laughs a little, nervously. Alex looks a little like she’s considering getting right back in the car and driving away. Her face is very red.
“Katya,” Katya says. “Is my actual name.” She can’t remember if they ever shared it online.
“Katya,” Alex says. “That’s pretty.”
Katya immediately misses the familiarity of the nickname.
“It’s short for Ekaterina,” she says, which isn’t what she meant to say at all, and then finally, “but you can call me Kat, if you want.”
Alex smiles.
“Kat it is, then.”
There’s another moment where they just stand, looking at each other, before Alex breaks it.
“You hungry?”
*~*~*~*~*
Alex drives them into the city. She plays music quietly through the radio, and she and Katya start to talk, in stilted little bursts. How was your day yesterday, and things about the weather. Alex talks about the drive from her school back to her family’s home, and about being glad to get out of the house. She glances over at Katya often, like she can’t quite believe she’s here.
Katya can’t blame her.
Eventually, Alex pulls over, parks on the street, and hops out of the car to open the passenger door for Katya. She takes Katya’s hand easily, and pulls her across the road to a building of green-painted brick, and holds the door open for her there, too.
Inside is a diner, the kind Katya knows from American TV shows, with plasticky faux-leather booths and chrome-edged tables and tile floors. It’s busy, and they’re made to wait for a bit on the sidewalk before they’re seated. Alex leans against the side of the building, looking like a cool girl from a movie, and keeps up their small talk while she watches her phone for the text about their table.
Finally, they sit down, and Alex orders them both coffee, which is not very good. Katya must make a face, because Alex laughs. She says something about diner coffee, and she pushes over a little tray filled with creamer and sugar in tiny individual containers. Katya does not think they will improve the situation. She drinks the coffee black.
Alex makes a big show about Katya not having had poutine yet and insists they order it along with their existing breakfast orders. Katya says it will be too much food. Alex waves her off.
“It’s Thanksgiving,” she says. “That’s like, the food holiday. You have to eat too much, it's the law.” Katya raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything.
The food comes quickly. The poutine is good, and saying so makes Alex smile. Although, Katya thinks, it’s hard to fuck up fries.
While they eat, Alex talks like she texts, in energetic bursts with topics that trip over one another. She doesn’t seem to mind that Katya’s English is slow, or that she is doing most of the talking. She fills the silence like it’s second nature.
And it is so familiar. Katya notices how they seem to fall right back into old patterns of speaking. They are slightly shifted now from being in person together, and Katya’s improved English, but they are familiar, nonetheless.
It feels like having a friend.
Katya knows that Carleton is lonely for her, but had not realized how much until now. The physical distance from the campus and the lovely distraction of spending easy time with a friend makes her realize how heavy she’s been feeling.
She knows she’ll have to go back to it all. But for a minute, it’s nice to float in this feeling of warmth, and not to worry.
Alex tells her about going to Queen’s. She plays hockey there, and says she’s a defender, and Katya allows herself a moment to think why is it always hockey with these people before she politely asks follow-ups. Alex isn’t going to play professionally. She was good enough for a scholarship, which is nice for the tuition, but she’s studying communications so she can “get a real job” after graduation.
“It’s fun, though,” she says. “We’re not the best team, but it’s a good group of girls. I’m going to miss them after I graduate in the spring.”
“What will you do then?” Katya asks.
“I don’t know,” Alex says. “Get a job somewhere.” She goes quiet for a second. “Anything so I don’t have to move back in with my parents.”
Katya hums, understanding.
“You are avoiding your family today too,” she says,
“Yeah.” Alex frowns down at her plate. “They’re not terrible. My mom is alright, and I love my little brothers, I just - my dad fucking sucks.”
“Like how?”
Alex scoffs.
“Mostly that he’s just a fucking sexist. I don’t like the way he treats my brothers or my mom. And when I come home for the holidays, it’s like… all I can notice is how she’s doing everything, for everybody, and then my dad expects me to help, but not either of my brothers - and it’s not because they’re too little, it’s because I’m the girl - and he says things about women sometimes that just make me insane. And I hate that like… I dipped out of the house today and left my mom to deal with it all herself but sometimes I feel like I’m just going to explode. And I don’t want to fight with him anymore. My mom hates it.”
Katya hums. Thinks about her own mother, slapping her across the face at the suggestion that they defy her father. The way she had seemed shocked at the movement of her own hand. How she had apologized for the action, but had never examined the impetus.
“He’s been weird since I came out, too,” Alex says. “It was a few years ago, now. He’s never said anything terrible to me directly, but sometimes the way he talks… I just hate it.”
She looks so miserable, then, picking at her omelet, that Katya’s heart hurts for her.
She thinks that their homes, their mothers and fathers, were probably very different. But listening to Alex talk, they feel very, very much the same.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” she says. Alex perks up immediately, the melancholy still present, but lessened by half in the blink of an eye as she smiles at Katya over the table.
“Of course,” she says. “I’m really happy you’re here.”
*~*~*~*~*
After breakfast, Alex takes them to the National Gallery of Canada. She says this is because it is important for Katya to experience the actually interesting things there are to do in Ottawa, which are few and far between, but that art is among them. Once they get there, Katya privately thinks it is at least seventy percent because Alex wants to see her reaction to the horrible giant spider sculpture out front.
She acts obligingly horrified, which Alex seems to enjoy.
Still, Katya can appreciate a museum. She enjoys skimming past the artworks as they wander through the halls, stopping only to admire ones they particularly like. She likes the way she gets a glimpse into Alex’s taste by watching what catches her eye, and wonders if Alex is noticing the same of her.
She likes shushing Alex when she cracks jokes a little too loudly or curses in front of parents there with their children. It feels silly, intimate, and youthful.
There is a lovely spatial sound exhibit with several dozen speakers spread around a recreation of a renaissance chapel that Katya spends a long time basking in for the way the echoes seem to resonate through her whole body. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, and when she opens them and tells Alex she’s ready to move on, she catches Alex snapping her gaze away, like she doesn’t want to be caught staring.
Katya catalogues it, and tucks it away close to her chest, and does not think about it too hard.
They spend a few hours there, not pressed to see everything, just wandering.
Eventually, they get bored of the museum and Alex suggests they cross the street to the park for some fresh air, and to look at the river.
“I’ll have to head home in a few hours,” she says. “But we can take a walk for a bit, if you want.”
Katya thinks maybe Alex is thinking of things to do to stall the time until they have to say goodbye. That maybe she wants to spend as long as she can before going back to her house.
Of course she says yes. Not just because she doesn’t want to go back to Carleton, either. Because she thinks about avoiding her parents’ apartment at all costs for the year she was seventeen, before she had the trust, and she understands.
So they wander the park, and take in the people who are running, and the people who are walking dogs, and the sight of an older couple on a picnic blanket. It is a beautiful day, with a light breeze, and not too cold, and Katya admires the leaves turning on the trees.
They end up settling on a bench by the waterfront, looking out over the point towards the parliament building.
“Okay so forgive me for asking, but,” Alex says, breaking the silence. Katya looks over. “Why Carleton?” Her eyes are very brown in the afternoon light as they look back at Katya, her brow furrowed. “Because like you said, you hate it there.”
Katya groans. Looks away, her eyes landing on a group of ducks paddling about by the riverbank, down the hill.
“It’s so stupid,” she says.
“I’m sure it’s not.”
It is. Katya thinks. Alex is being kind, but she really has no idea.
And then it occurs to Katya that Alex really, really has no idea. Because Alex is queer. Alex plays hockey. Women’s hockey, but still, what are the chances that any lifelong Canadian native and avid hockey fan, much less a hockey player, much less a queer hockey player wouldn’t know who Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are?
And Katya feels, once again, a bit like an idiot, because through all of her daydreaming and stressing and ruminating and internet stalking it did not occur to her that being related to Ilya Rozanov publicly would not only be an issue in Russia. It could be an entirely different problem for her in Canada. Katya is already the odd student out in her classes because of her language, her accent, her attitude. What would it be like to also be Ilya Rozanov’s niece? How many of her classmates are hockey fans?
“Kat?” Alex asks. She’s leaning forward, trying to catch Katya’s eye. Katya realizes she’s been zoning out. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Something kicks in her chest, then. And Katya realizes she does want to tell Alex. Because Alex messaged her after a year of silence because she remembered her, and saw something that made her think Katya might be sad. Because Alex dropped everything on a weekend with her family to come be with Katya instead, and even if Alex’s family is pissing her off, it was still kind.
So Katya wants to tell her. Not everything, of course. Katya’s not ready for that. But some of it.
She sighs.
“I have family in Ottawa.”
“Oh.” Alex goes quiet for a second. This is obviously not what she was expecting. Especially, Katya thinks, because the premise of their meet-up had been nominally because Katya didn’t have family to visit for the holiday.
Alex is clearly confused, but she rallies admirably.
“That’s not stupid, that… makes sense if you’re going to go study abroad. I’m sure it’s nice to be close to people you know.”
“One person. And that’s the stupid part. I don’t know him.”
She can see Alex lean forward, listening, out of the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t push. She just waits.
“I have an uncle,” Katya says. She does not look to her right to where Alex is listening intently. “He moved to the US when I was little, and I only saw him maybe once a year. And then, when I was seven, he stopped visiting.”
Katya finds that once she starts talking about it, it’s like she can’t stop. It all starts to press on the inside of her chest and threatens to spill out in far too much detail. She feels like she has to hold specifics back between her teeth.
“And my family never talked about him anymore,” she says, painting around the shape of it, “and then I found out it is because he is queer. He married a Canadian man and now they live here.”
She breathes. Stares at the shimmering water.
“And I don’t like my parents.” An understatement, but what else is there to say? How is she to describe the enormity of it? She thinks back to the way Alex spoke about her own father, that morning, and thinks that she will understand.
“And I thought,” she says, “maybe if I study in Ottawa, I can get in touch with him? Because I remember him a little, and I liked him.”
Katya drops her gaze to her lap, where she is twisting her hands together.
“But I have been here almost two months,” she admits, “and haven’t done anything about it.”
“Fuck, Kat.” The nickname in Alex’s voice makes her look up. Alex’s brown eyes are huge, and so blatantly sympathetic. She shows her expressions so completely, across every millimeter of her face. “Can I ask why you haven’t reached out to him?”
Katya swallows.
“Because maybe he doesn’t want to see me. My father is awful, and I think he was awful to him, and maybe I am not… a good reminder?”
“But you were just a kid,” Alex protests. It’s not just her face that shows all her emotion, Katya thinks. Her voice is just the same way. “Right? The last time he saw you? Surely he wouldn’t be mad at you for having shitty parents. I mean, unless he also sucks.”
“I don’t think he sucks,” Katya says, filled with an urge to defend him, even though she doesn’t know him at all. “He was kind.”
“So?”
Katya shifts on the bench, uncomfortable. She can’t bring herself to look at Alex.
“It’s complicated,” she says. “He is maybe happy now, and I don’t know if he wants anything to do with me.” She pulls in a painful breath. “What if he just wanted to forget?”
“What if he doesn’t, though-”
“Alex. Stop.” Her voice comes out sharp.
Alex stops. Leans back against the bench, pulling herself out of Katya’s periphery. Katya immediately regrets snapping at her.
She doesn’t say anything for a long time, then. They just sit, looking out at the water. Katya wants to say something. To apologize. She doesn’t.
She watches the ducks at the bottom of the hill diving down into the water, their tail feathers in the air, and the way they shake shimmering droplets from their heads when they come back up.
Alex takes a deep, audible breath.
“I’m going to leave it alone after this, Kat. I promise,” she says. “But can I just say one more thing?”
“Fine,” Katya mutters. She feels her shoulders come down just a little. She is irrationally glad that it seems nothing is broken between them, her and this girl she has known for six years and just a day.
“Maybe he doesn’t want anything to do with you,” Alex starts. “But if so, that’s his decision, and he’s an adult, and he can always just… I don’t know, leave you on read? But I think you should say something, because clearly he meant something to you, and no offense, but it kind of sounds like this place sucks for you, and I think that if he is nice, having someone around like that could be really great for you.”
A breeze kicks up, ruffling Katya’s hair and the leaves on the trees. It plays across the surface of the water.
“And like…” Alex says, careful, like stepping on ice, “as long as you can show him you’re not homophobic and you know about the whole situation, it could be great.”
Katya can feel Alex’s eyes on her, but she does not look back. She half-sees from the corner of her eye as Alex swallows, and turns her head back to the view.
“That’s all,” she says, and she is quiet.
That’s all, Katya thinks. Like it isn’t a gift. Like Alex hasn’t reached into Katya’s head and untangled the knot that’s been tying itself for weeks before Katya ever noticed it happening.
Something in Katya knows that Alex is right. It was the reason she applied to Carleton’s program in the first place. Something in her wanted to be close to her uncle, to see him again. Was still wanting, just like when she was little, to know how it felt to have someone who is hers out of love, and not obligation, or the expectation of something returned.
Alex says it like it’s obvious: Like the potential of the thing she could have is worth the risk and shattering disappointment of knowing, once and for all, that maybe she can’t have it, no matter how hard she tries.
Katya thinks about it, and she can feel the knot beginning to unravel, here, on this bench, in this park.
It’s too much to unravel all at once, though, and Alex is still there, waiting.
“That was more than one thing,” Katya says, and she slides her gaze over to where Alex is looking back at her.
Alex’s smile is very nice. Katya feels a little rush when she knocks their shoulders together.
“Yeah, well,” Alex says. And Katya thinks she is maybe sitting a little closer than she was, just a moment ago.
*~*~*~*~*
Alex drives them back to Katya’s dorm when the afternoon light begins to get low. She says she would stay longer, but her mom worries when she drives after dark.
They don’t talk. Alex hums along quietly with a French song on the radio as they wind back in the direction of Carleton’s campus. The late afternoon sun is golden, and the light floods the car in sudden bursts as they move in and out of the long shadow of Ottawa’s buildings.
They leave downtown, and then it is neighborhoods upon neighborhoods of houses, where it is just getting far enough into the evening for Katya to see light through the windows.
“Maybe I will message him,” she says, suddenly. “Maybe.” She doesn’t have to specify who she’s talking about.
She can feel Alex perk up next to her.
“Hell yeah!” she says. “And hey, if you need someone to bully you into it, you can always text me.” She turns her head for just a second to beam in Katya’s direction, almost a tease. “As a neutral third party, I will happily encourage you to show no restraint.”
Katya laughs.
“Okay.”
They fall silent once more. Katya watches the road pass under the car. They wait at stoplights. Alex hums to her music, and Katya listens to her fingers as they drum little patterns on the steering wheel.
Eventually, Katya begins to recognize some of the streets from their morning drive. She can feel a quiet dread creeping up at the thought of going back to her lonely little dorm room. But it hasn’t quite reached her heart yet. She clings to these final moments of the day, with Alex, who came to drag her out of that sad little room, and is so wonderfully alive next to her, in this tiny little haven of her car.
“Hey,” Alex says, and Katya’s head snaps to look at her. Alex is watching the road, intently. She swallows. Flexes her hands on the wheel
“I’m going to be up here in like… a few weeks?” she says. “For a game. If you want to hang out again.”
Katya looks at her, and looks, and looks.
“I would like that,” she says, finally. “To see you again.”
It feels like something you’d say after a date. Katya lets herself think about that for approximately three seconds, and about Canada, and about how Alex looked at her on the bench by the water with the sun lighting up her brown, brown eyes, and about how the rules here are different than the place she grew up, before she carefully files it all away in the back of her mind, to be examined in the undefined later.
Alex is smiling, and Katya thinks she can take a simple pleasure in that, in making someone smile. It can be the kind of pleasure that does not require examination, for now.
“Great,” Alex says. “Then I’ll text you.”
*~*~*~*~*
Alex drops her off right next to her building, and gets out of the car to hug Katya goodbye.
She is so much taller that for a moment Katya thinks she is going to be swept right off her feet. But she isn’t. It is just a firm, quick hug.
“Hang in there, Kat.” Alex says. “It was great meeting you for real.”
“You too,” Katya says.
She tries to pull up gratitude through the rapidly descending cloud of worry and loneliness and inadequacy that she thinks might be permanently associated with Carleton’s campus for her. It is as though her energy began to be siphoned away the moment her feet touched the ground.
Still, she tries to be grateful, above it. Today was a good day.
“Okay,” Alex says. “I gotta go. See you in a few weeks, okay?”
“Good luck with your family,” Katya tells her. She already misses the hug.
Alex rolls her eyes good-naturedly.
“Thanks.” She’s walking backwards around the front of the car, not breaking eye contact.
“Text your uncle!” she says, pointing at Katya.
Katya rolls her eyes back.
“Goodbye.”
*~*~*~*~*
Katya forces herself to grab something from the dining hall before going back to her room, but she doesn’t feel much in the mood to eat. She takes a few bites and then shoves the rest of the food in her fridge, before swapping out her day clothes for pajamas and crawling right into her bed.
She can feel the day draining away from her. She lays on her side and looks up at her window, and watches the sky turn dark blue, and then purple, and then the orange-black of night, polluted by Carleton’s streetlights.
Her phone pings next to her. Katya turns it over.
From: Alex
Made it home safe!
Katya smiles.
*~*~*~*~*
After Thanksgiving, there are four days of class before a week-long fall break. Many students don’t bother to return for the one or two class sessions, choosing to take an absence, and the campus remains quiet and slow.
Katya should be studying for midterms. And she tries. But following Alex’s visit, things have changed.
For one thing, Alex keeps texting her. Little messages throughout the day. Innocuous pictures or complaints about her own assignments. Katya responds to them all.
And for another, ever since their conversation, Katya feels like she can no longer ignore the elephant in the room that is her Uncle Ilya.
Alex was right. Katya has to reach out, if only to know if he’s someone worth knowing, once and for all. In the light of day, with a friend to talk to, she can admit to herself that perhaps she was being dramatic, thinking that he would reject her contact out of hand.
She tries to think through the facts.
She can’t be sure that her uncle ever wants to see her again. Leaving money for a kid to go to college and start a life away from your terrible brother is different than wanting to know that kid, especially when the kid is not such a kid anymore, is grown up, and different, and has your brother’s eyes. Your brother, who is mean and small, and who called you disgusting things when he thought his daughter wasn't listening. All of this is true.
It is also true that Uncle Ilya never came back to Russia for reasons that are beyond his control. And Katya, while she is her father’s daughter, is not her father, and feels differently about her uncle in just about every way. And Alex is right that she was a child. Perhaps he would not hold a grudge against her, if he is as kind as she remembers.
So the task of reaching out to Uncle Ilya remains and Katya knows she must do it. She thinks she can do it.
Which leaves her with a secondary problem: the how.
The thing is, she should have asked for contact information years ago, when his lawyers and financial managers reached out, when they told her about the trust. She should have followed up then. But she was newly eighteen, and so angry, and everything was so overwhelming, and it wasn’t until months later that she looked up and thought that was my chance.
And now, here she is, almost twenty-one years old, with nowhere to start, and every method she comes up with for reaching out to him just feels wrong.
She spends days clicking over to his instagram whenever she’s free, thinking maybe she should just DM him, but the problem there is that he’s famous. If Katya was famous she would not be looking at her Instagram DMs. If Katya was famous, and marginalized, and could never go home again, a random message from a stranger with her last name would be anything but an incentive to read and reply.
It also feels silly, and childish, to message him that way. Hi, it’s me, your niece from forever ago. Thanks for the millions. Want to get coffee? By the way, I don’t mind that you’re married to a man and I know that my parents are awful. Do you know a good immigration lawyer?
So Instagram is out.
And it’s not like she can get his number online, even though she spends an embarrassing amount of time thinking about paying for those websites that promise to show you people’s information for a few dollars per search.
She thinks about signing up to volunteer for the Irina Foundation somehow, but then thinks about how she’d feel if it was her, at her job, doing something she cares about, and she had an estranged family member walk up to her out of nowhere. She shudders to think about it.
Sending something to the corporate email is out, too. There’s no guarantee it would even get to her uncle, probably screened out as spam long before he ever saw it, and if not, then Katya would be involving a stranger in their family drama, which makes her feel slimy just thinking about it.
On day three of circling around the same problem over and over, she thinks maybe she should just start going to Centaurs games, on the off chance he’s there, which is when she knows that the problem has officially gotten out of hand.
The solution to her problem comes from the stupidest of places, in the end.
There’s a networking event with alumni from Katya’s program at Carleton during the odd half-week between Thanksgiving and fall break. Katya attends, of course, and spends an hour making awkward small talk with people in government jobs, gets a professional-looking headshot taken, and is walked through making a Linkedin profile, half because she is eager to apply her energy to anything that will take her mind off the looming specter of her Uncle Ilya, and half because she is trying to be a good student and make a future for herself.
The following day, she is clicking through Linkedin invites from fellow students in her program and alumni she met the day before, when it occurs to her that she could search her uncle’s name.
Ilya Rozanov does not have a Linkedin page. Which, honestly, seems to fit, based on everything she knows about him. In looking him up, she sees posts from the Irina Foundation’s page that include his name, the occasional photo from events, and clean, corporate language. There are asks for donations, thank you’s to important donors, mission messages, impact reports.
And then Katya sees it: one of the Irina Foundation’s posts reposted by one Shane Hollander.
She clicks through.
There’s a corporate-looking headshot of him in a suit, stiff and formal, and a series of reposts from the Irina Foundation page, each accompanied by the most boring, on-brand, on-mission little comments.
And Katya gets an idea.
It’s so stupid. It’s so stupid. It is entirely possible that Shane Hollander does not even run his own page, because god knows he has enough money to get someone to do it for him. But even after she closes her laptop and goes back to her dorm, as she’s lying on her bed that night scrolling through her tumblr and clicking back and forth into her text thread with Alex, she can’t get it out of her head.
She pays for a premium subscription for a month just so she can send him a message, and she cringes the entire way through the payment process, and through the sixteen drafts she writes and deletes before she is confident enough to send it.
She has to close her eyes when she clicks send, and as soon as she sees it delivered, she slams her laptop closed and buries her face in her bed, and screams.
*~*~*~*~*
Katya is twenty-one when she messages the following to Shane Hollander on Linkedin:
Dear Mr. Hollander,
My name is Ekaterina Rozanova. My father is Alexei Rozanov, brother to your husband, Ilya Rozanov. You will see from my profile that I am currently in Ottawa studying international affairs on an exchange program from my university in Russia.
I am sending this message because I want to get in touch with my uncle and thank him for the gift of the trust he set up for me. It has been so important to my education and helped me so much.
I know this is an odd way to reach out, but I could not think of another that would be private and make it easier to verify who I am. Please forgive me for the intrusion, and using you as a messenger. I hope you understand.
I understand if my uncle is not interested in seeing me, but I promise I do not mean any harm to either of you and do not intend to say anything to my parents about this. I would just like to see him again.
Thank you for reading this. You can reach me at the following email and phone number:
*~*~*~*~*