A Shared Meal of Lies

The air in the foreman's office, though stale and thick with the mineral tang of the deep earth, offered a respite from the pervasive damp and chill of the tunnels. A single, flickering oil lamp cast long, dancing shadows across the scarred wooden desk and the two figures huddled near it. Anya had managed to salvage a few hard biscuits and a tin of preserved fish from the debris of a collapsed supply depot. The contents were meagre, offering little sustenance but a semblance of ritual.

Mykhailo unwrapped a biscuit, the dry crumbs clinging to his rough, dirt-stained fingers. He broke off a piece and offered it to Anya. She met his gaze, her eyes wide and dark in the lamplight, and gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. He ate it slowly, chewing with a deliberation that seemed to stretch the moment thin.

"It's good," he said, his voice raspy from disuse and the dry air. "Even with the grit. You know, back… back home, my wife, she used to bake. Sourdough. With seeds. She’d always say the secret was in the patient waiting. Like coaxing a shy bloom from the earth." He paused, his gaze drifting to a corner of the room where the shadows were deepest. "She had this way of… of making everything feel warm. Even in winter."

He reached into the breast pocket of his worn fatigues and, with surprising gentleness, extracted a creased, dog-eared photograph. He smoothed it out on the desk, the lamplight catching the faded colours. It showed a woman with kind eyes and a faint smile, holding a small child on her hip. The child, a girl with bright, curious eyes and hair the colour of honey, beamed at the camera.

“This is Lena,” Mykhailo continued, his voice softening, becoming almost reverent. “My daughter. She loved the sea. We lived not far from it, you see. Used to go for walks on the beach, collect shells. She had a whole collection. Labeled them all. ‘Conch,’ ‘Scallop,’ ‘Auger.’ Always so precise.” He traced the outline of the girl’s face with a calloused fingertip, his touch feather-light. “She’d point out the birds. Gulls, terns. Always asking questions. So many questions.”

Anya watched him, her expression carefully neutral, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. The silence between his words stretched, filled only by the faint hiss of the lamp and the distant, almost imperceptible drip of water somewhere in the mine’s depths. The image of the woman and child seemed impossibly bright, impossibly real, a sharp counterpoint to the desolation surrounding them.

Mykhailo’s gaze remained fixed on the photograph, a faint, almost imperceptible smile playing on his lips. “She’d ask me about my work. I told her I was a professor. Taught them about… about words. How they shape things. How they can build worlds, or tear them down.” He let out a soft sigh, a sound laden with a weariness that went deeper than physical exhaustion. “She’d listen, her head tilted just so. And then she’d draw me pictures. Of me, holding her. Like this.” He gestured vaguely at the photograph. “Always with a smile.”

The truth of it, the sheer, unvarnished longing for a life that had perhaps never existed beyond these scraps of paper and the desperate architecture of his mind, hung in the air. It was a fragile thing, this constructed intimacy, built on the shifting sands of a fractured self. Yet, in the dim, subterranean light, it felt as substantial as the rock walls around them.

The lamplight, a small, trembling sun in the cavernous office, caught the sheen of unshed tears in Anya’s eyes. Mykhailo, lost in the soft glow of his fabricated memories, continued to murmur about Lena’s precise labelling of shells, his voice a low, melodic hum that warred with the mine’s oppressive silence. He was so earnest, so wholly convinced of the reality of the woman and child in the photograph. Anya’s throat tightened, a knot of a thousand unsaid words. She saw not the loving father he portrayed, but the shattered remnants of a man, desperately stitching together a past from the detritus of a war he couldn’t remember fighting.

Her fingers twitched, the urge to reach out, to touch his arm, to whisper Yevhen’s name, a physical ache. *He's not him.* The thought was a cold, sharp pebble in her gut. Yevhen, her brother, had been a scientist, not a soldier. A botanist, with hands stained green from earth, not grimed with gunpowder. He’d spoken of seeds, of the future of flora, not of phantom saboteurs or imagined families.

She saw it then, the ghost of her brother in Mykhailo’s earnestness, in his desperate need to *believe*. It was a terrible mirroring, a shared hunger for something tangible in a world ripped apart. A desperate, primal need for anchor. And she, Anya, was the one holding the anchor, but for him, it was a delusion.

*Tell him.* The command echoed in the hollow space behind her ribs. *Tell him the photograph is of a woman and child from another village, another time. Tell him he’s not a professor, not a father.* The words clawed at her tongue, a desperate, bitter truth waiting to be spat out. She imagined his face, the sudden crumpling of that fragile façade, the raw, uncomprehending pain. It would be like striking a child, a vulnerable, lost child.

But then, her gaze flickered to the secured satchel at her feet, the weight of the seeds a tangible promise within. Her mission. Yevhen’s legacy. The future she carried, fragile and vital, depended on this carefully constructed charade. To shatter Mykhailo’s reality now would be to risk everything, to unravel the precarious path they had carved through the darkness. She had to stay the course. For Yevhen. For the seeds.

Her breath hitched, a small, ragged sound that went unnoticed by the man lost in his constructed universe. She clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palms, a sharp, grounding pain. The words remained trapped, a silent scream behind her lips. The silence stretched, vast and deep, punctuated only by the persistent, metallic whisper of the wind through unseen shafts. She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, steeling herself. The sorrow remained, a heavy cloak, but beneath it, a cold, hard resolve began to solidify. Her path was clear, however much it cost. She opened her eyes, her expression once again a mask of quiet observation, the nascent whisper of a warning unuttered, swallowed by the encroaching dark.