Caroline
Afon won't tell me where we're going.
He says it's a surprise, which is richly ironic coming from a man who spent the first week I knew him refusing to tell me what day it was.
But here we are, in the truck, driving north, with Wolf stretched out in the back seat like the furry king he is.
Afon's hand rests heavy on my knee, his wedding band glinting gold, humming along to some old song on the radio.
And yet I'm being incredibly grumpy and annoying.
"Just tell me," I beg. "You know I hate surprises."
"I know you do."
"So that's why you're doing it. You're punishing me."
"What would I be punishing you for?" he asks.
"For being right about the azaleas."
He laughs. He laughs a lot now. It still gets me every time, that sound coming out of him, like a hinge that finally got oiled after twenty years of rust. "You weren't right about the azaleas. They almost died."
"They didn't, though! They're thriving!"
"They're thriving because I moved them out of the shade, which I told you to do in May."
"Semantics," I say, and he laughs again.
I turn my gaze out the window as thick pine trees whip past. I know we're in the Catskills.
I still recognize this environment, even if half my memories of it involves being lost, concussed, kidnapped, shot at, or some combination of the above.
It looks different in October. The leaves are turning, all reds and golds, the whole mountainside lit up.
It's beautiful in a way it never was when everything was white and also trying to kill me.
"You're taking me back," I say slowly. "To the mountain."
"Trust me" is all he says.
I do, so I shut up.
We turn off the main road onto a dirt one, and then off that onto a narrower one, and then there's no road at all, just two ruts through the trees. Wolf sits up in the back, ears perked, nose working. He knows this place. I can tell. His whole body has gone alert and happy.
"Wait," I say. "Is this…?"
"Almost there."
The trees thin. The truck bumps over a rise. And then we're in a clearing, and I know exactly where we are, because I've seen this clearing in my nightmares and my daydreams both.
This is where I face-planted into a rock.
This is where it all started.
But it's not the same. The old cabin is gone. I knew that. Reznik's men burned it. I figured the spot was just a black smear in the dirt now, a grave for a house.
It's not.
There's a cabin here.
A new one. Cedar shingles and a stone chimney and a tin roof, just like before, but newer, the wood still pale and raw in places where it hasn't weathered yet.
There's a porch. There's a woodpile, of course, stacked neat and high against the side.
There's a stovepipe with a thin curl of smoke coming out of it, which means someone's been here, which means—
"You built this," I say.
Afon puts the truck in park and shuts off the engine. "I did."
"When?"
"Started in May. Been coming up on weekends. Whenever you thought I was off doing Lukas's business." He scratches the back of his neck, looking almost shy, which is a thing I never thought I'd see on this man. "I wanted it done before today."
I look at the cabin. I look at him. "Why today?"
"Get out of the truck and I'll show you."
So I get out. Wolf bolts past me the second I open the door, sniffing everything, marking the corner of the porch like he's reclaiming his territory. He bounds up the steps and turns around and barks at us, like, Well? are you coming?
Afon comes around the truck and takes my hand. He walks me across the clearing to a spot maybe twenty yards from the porch, half-hidden behind a tree.
"Here," he says, "is where you fell."
I look down. There's a rock there, half-sunk in the dirt, with moss growing over one side.
The rock. The rock. The one that cracked my skull open and knocked me out and started this whole insane chain of events that ended with me married to a former hitman and the proud co-owner of a vegetable garden and a bullet-scarred dog.
"You kept the rock," I say incredulously. "I'm flattered."
"Couldn't move it if I tried. Thing's the size of a Volkswagen under the dirt." He looks down at it with me. "But yeah. I kept it. Built the place so I could see it from the kitchen window."
"Why would you want to see the rock that nearly gave me brain damage?"
"Because that's where you came from," he says simply. "I was standing at the sink and I looked up and there you were, falling on your face. I thought my whole life was over." He squeezes my hand. "Turns out it was just starting."
Well, what am I supposed to say to that?! I just lean into him. He puts his arm around me, and we stand there looking at the rock for a while, the leaves coming down around us, Wolf supervising from the porch.
"Do you know what today is?" he asks.
"Saturday? I think?"
"It's October thirty-first."
I think about it. And then I get it, all at once, the whole thing clicking into place. "Oh!"
"One year ago today," he says, "you walked out of those trees and ruined my life."
"Saved your life."
"Same thing." He turns me to face him. "I wanted to bring you back to the exact spot on the exact day. A full circle. Like the one I always wanted but never thought I'd get."
I'm crying. I cry at everything now. I've fully given up on being a person who doesn't cry. "You're an idiot," I manage to sniffle out.
He grins. He knows exactly what I mean. "What kind of idiot?" he asks, playing along.
I punch him in the chest. "The bravest, stupidest one I've ever met."
Inside, it's everything the old one was and more. A new moose head has found its home over the fireplace, which makes me shudder in horror. The rest of it is just like I remember, too: a plaid couch, a cozy kitchen, and open shelves.
Thank God, though, there's not one can of beans in sight.
The bed in the bedroom is huge, covered in a massive quilt.
On the nightstand, propped up, is the photograph of Afon, Gervasii, Yelena, standing in front of a restaurant a lifetime ago.
The crease still runs down the middle. But it's in a frame now, behind glass, sitting out where anyone can see it.
I run my finger along the edge. "You framed it."
He joins me and wraps me up from behind. "I figured you wouldn't mind."
"I don't," I say. And I mean it. There's room in this house for Yelena. There's room in him for her. Loving someone who's gone doesn't take anything away from loving someone who's here.
Afon has a whole heart. There's enough of it for both of us.
We light a fire that night.
Afon builds it, and within minutes, the whole front room is glowing orange and warm.
The wind is picking up as the sun sets, rattling the windows, and a coyote is howling in the distance.
Wolf lifts his head off the rug and growls deep in his chest, then decides it's not worth the effort and goes back to sleep.
"It's Halloween," I say, curled into Afon's side on the couch. "We should be doing something spooky."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Tell a scary story."
He ponders. Then, in his gravelly voice, he says, "Once upon a time, a city girl with no survival skills hiked into the mountains by herself with a dead phone and one granola bar."
I smack his chest. "That's not scary, that's a documentary."
"It's the scariest story I know," he says. "I lived it. I have nightmares."
"Oh, shut up, you do not."
"I do," he swears. "I dream about you wandering into the woods with no coat and freezing to death before I find you." He says it lightly, but his arm tightens around me when he does. "That one's worse than the old ones. The old ones I'm used to."
I tilt my head up to look at him. The firelight does something to his face, softens it, fills in the hard lines. "You don't have to have that dream," I tell him. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"I know that." He brushes my hair back from my face, and his thumb paints my cheekbone, slow. "Doesn't stop the dreams. But it makes them easier to wake up from."
I kiss him then, because I can't not, and it goes the way these things go now, slow at first and then less slow, and then he's pulling me into his lap and I'm tugging at the hem of his sweater, and we end up naked on the rug in front of the fire because the couch is too far away and the bed is even farther.
He kisses the scar on my chin where the rock got me, then my throat, my collarbone, the gold ring on my finger. He says I love you about forty times, like he's still making up for the twenty years he spent saying nothing to anyone.
And when he finally moves into me, the fire warm on one side of us and his body warm on the other, he says, "Look at me," and I do, and his eyes aren't concrete, they're open, they're his, they're full of everything.
"I love you, Caroline Satyrin," he says.
"I love you, too, my stupid, brave idiot," I tell him, and he laughs, even now, even like this, and then neither of us is laughing anymore.
I wake up in the new bed wearing his flannel.
I don't even remember putting it on. I remember the fire dying down and Afon carrying me to bed because my legs didn't work, and then I remember nothing because I slept like the dead, which is what happens when you marry a man who keeps you safe and warm and the only thing killing you anymore is a vegetable garden that needs weeding.
It's early. Afon is still asleep beside me, on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. Wolf is a heavy lump at the foot of the bed, taking up more than his share and snoring like a train.
I lie there for a minute, warm and happy, and then my stomach does a thing.
A familiar thing. It's been doing this for about a week now, mostly in the mornings. I've been telling myself it's my excessive coffee consumption or the stress of work or the rich food at Lukas's or anything, anything other than the thing it might actually be.
I get up. Careful, quiet, so I don't wake him. I pad out to the bathroom, the floorboards cold under my bare feet, and I dig through my bag to find the box I bought at the pharmacy in Kingston three days ago and have been too scared to open.
Now feels like a good time to open it.
I read the instructions even though pee on a stick and wait for the chorus of angels to proclaim your fate is pretty straightforward to anyone who's ever watched a teenage rom-com movie.
I do my business, then set it on the edge of the counter.
While I wait for said angels to appear, I peer out the window and look at that godforsaken rock that started all of this.
Stupid, stubborn boulder. I never imagined it would give me a family of my own. I should probably go tell it thank you.
When I glance back down, the little window on the test has changed.
Two lines.
I sit there for a long time in disbelief. Two lines. Two lines. It works out to a baby sometime in the early summer, when the azaleas will be blooming and the garden will be full and the mountain will be green instead of trying to kill us.
Afon is going to be so happy.
I get up and slink back to the bedroom. He's awake now, propped up on one elbow, his hair a mess, but he smiles when he sees me.
"Where'd you go?" he asks, voice thick with sleep.
I come and sit on the edge of the bed. Wolf lifts his head, decides I'm not a threat, and lays it back down. Instead of answering, I just hold the test out, the two lines facing him.
Afon looks at it. He doesn't move. He doesn't breathe. I watch him work it out, and the exact second it lands, when his face just opens. Completely.
"Is that—"
"Yeah."
He sits up all the way. He takes the test from my hand, so gently, like it might break.
And then this big, scarred, dangerous, ruined, gentle man, this former killer who took a bullet across the hip and didn't tell me, who carried my empty granola bar wrapper down a mountain, who built me a cabin on the spot where I cracked my head open…
He starts to cry.
"I had my year," he rasps. "I told myself I had my year and that was all I'd get."
I crawl into his lap and put my arms around him. "You get more than one chance," I whisper into his hair. "We all do. That's the whole point."
He holds me tight. Wolf decides this is a group event and shoves his big head between us, and Afon laughs and cries at the same time. I bet the rock is laughing, too.
It's a full circle.
"Three of us," he says against my shoulder. "Then four."
"All four of us," I tell him. "Stupid, brave idiots, every one."
Check out Book 1 of the Boardroom Billionaire series, Boardroom Sins, by clicking here!