Chapter 29
PIPER
The contraction crests. I crush Nikita’s hand and swear at him with everything I’ve got. He holds on without flinching, steady and unbothered by the swearing.
“You need to breathe through the top of it,” he says, close to my ear.
I want to tell him where he can put his breathing.
I don’t, because the breathing helps, and because his voice is the only thing in this bright loud room that isn’t a machine.
There was never a version of this where I push three of them out; Mila scheduled a cesarean for the end of the week months ago.
Labor started a handful of days early, so the contractions are only what we’re outrunning to the operating room.
I focus on getting through each one until I get a spinal block.
“I need you to talk to me,” I say between waves. “Anything. I don’t care.”
He starts with the nursery. He tells me about the three cribs he assembled himself last week and then had Platon check because he didn’t trust his own work with something this important.
Apparently, he read the instructions twice and still put one rail on backward.
Platon found it in four seconds, said nothing, and handed him the screwdriver.
I laugh in the middle of a contraction, and it turns into a sound that isn’t a laugh.
He talks about nothing important while the nurses finish my blood work, the anesthesiologist reviews the plan, and three neonatal teams assemble outside the operating room.
I ride out each contraction until Mila says they’re ready, which means the operating room now.
The operating room is colder and brighter than I expect, and it fills with more people than I can count.
The anesthesiologist slides something cool into the line already running into my arm, then works at the small of my back.
The spinal removes every sensation below my ribs until the lower half of me seems absent.
They raise a blue drape across my chest so I can’t see past my own ribs, and Nikita appears at my head in a gown and a paper cap, close, his mouth at my ear, the only warm thing in a room built out of steel.
“I can see,” he says. “I’ll tell you everything. You won’t miss a second of it.”
That’s the deal we make without saying it.
I can’t see past the drape and I can’t feel what they’re doing.
I feel only pressure, a deeply insistent pulling that isn’t pain but knows where pain lives.
I read the room the only way left to me, through him, through the face I’ve spent almost a year learning to translate.
He tightens his grip on mine. “They’ve got the first one. Piper, they’ve got him—”
The sound arrives before he finishes. A doctor lifts my first son above the drape for one second before the team takes him to be checked. He’s tiny, red, and furious, and his cry brings tears to my eyes. I’m crying and I didn’t decide to.
“That’s one,” Nikita says, and his voice isn’t steady. I’ve heard this man stay level through a gun against my head. His voice breaks on a single number.
The second comes a minute behind his brother, faster than I’m ready for, another boy, and quieter this time. They lift him over the drape too, and then he’s gone to the warm lights, where a nurse rubs him down and murmurs at him until he complains about it. That makes two.
Nikita presses his mouth to my damp hair and says something in Russian I don’t catch and don’t need translated.
Then the third, and the room’s easy rhythm changes.
She comes out silently. The first two cried immediately, so I know something is wrong before anyone speaks. Two doctors move at once. Someone says a word I don’t know, clipped, and the warmer across the room fills with people whose backs are to me.
I can’t sit up, feel my own legs, or do anything but lie pinned and open on a table while they work on my daughter six feet away.
Nikita closes one hand hard around mine and brings the other to the side of my face, turning me toward him instead of toward the backs I can’t read.
“Mila,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Mila, I need to know where she is.”
A neonatologist leans over Sofia while another doctor calls out her heart rate and oxygen level.
Mila stays close to me, listening to them, and Mila’s control keeps me from panicking.
She watches for three seconds that take a year, then she turns and looks straight at me, because she knows I need her eyes more than I need her words.
“Her heart rate is strong,” Mila says, clear and even, pitched to carry over the noise.
“She needs help opening her lungs, and she’s responding.
They’re starting CPAP and taking her to the NICU.
Her oxygen is rising, and she’s responding exactly as they want.
You need to watch the monitor with me instead of their backs. ”
I look at the monitor but don’t understand the monitor, so I keep my gaze on Mila instead.
She keeps her attention on the neonatal team until one doctor calls out that Sofia’s oxygen is climbing.
Nikita squeezes my hand and exhales against my temple.
Then the sound comes, thin, outraged, and late, the best sound in the entire world, and my daughter starts to scream.
“There she is,” Mila says, and only now, with the crying started, does she let herself smile. “Three. All three, and all of them loud. That last one’s going to be the one who gives you trouble.”
“She’s already trouble.” I’m sobbing and laughing at once. “She waited on purpose.”
They bring the boys to me one at a time while the surgical team finishes closing the incision.
A nurse supports each baby against my cheek because I can’t hold him safely yet.
I press my face to each of them and memorize the smell before he’s lifted away.
Sofia I only get to see, not hold, because she already has the smallest mask over the smallest face, helping her breathe.
She scowls at me around it. I fall completely in love with her scowl.
“They’re all right,” Nikita says, not quite a question, watching the team wheel the incubators toward the doors.
“They’re where they need to be,” Mila says.
“All three are stable. The boys are breathing on their own, the girl has a little help, and none of that is a surprise at almost thirty-five weeks. They’ll spend some time in the NICU, and then they’ll come home.
” She strips off her gloves. “Nikita, you should go with them. Piper is in good hands here, and someone should be at the glass when they get settled. You should go be their father.”
He looks at me, torn clean in half.
“You should go,” I say. “I’ll still be here. I want you at the glass when they get settled.”
He goes and stays with them for two hours. He returns just after they start moving me to a recovery room.
He looks besotted. “They’re perfect, Piper.”
I nod, blinking back tears, with my throat too clogged to speak.
Platon and Maren come first, once I’m out of surgery and into a recovery room with a door that closes, the feeling crawling back into my legs one cold inch at a time.
Platon stops inside the door like he’s not sure he’s allowed, which is new, because he’s walked into every other room in my life like he owned the floor. He’s already been to the NICU glass. I can see it in his smile. Maren is beaming too.
“Three,” he says. He looks at me, then at Nikita, then back. “You do nothing by halves.”
“Did you see them?”
“I saw them.” Platon looks overwhelmed for one unguarded second. “The one with the mask has your expression exactly. She looked at me like my existence displeased her.”
“Sofia,” says Nikita with a proud-papa smile.
Maren squeezes my hand and tells me I look terrible and she’s proud of me. They don’t stay long. Platon puts one hand on Nikita’s shoulder before he leaves. Neither of them speaks. They don’t need to.
By evening, they let me be wheeled in to sit beside the incubators, and Vera arrives while I’m there. A nurse settles the stronger of the boys against my chest, skin to skin, wires and all.
When my arms tire, Vera comes as close to asking permission as she ever does.
“May I hold him?” The nurse nods, and Vera takes him with hands that have clearly done this before, decades before, for babies in this same family who grew into hard men.
She holds him against her shoulder, careful of every lead.
Vera loses control of her expression for one second, then recovers. When she looks up, her eyes are wet, and she looks furious about it.
“He has the Rusakov chin,” she says, like an accusation and a gift. “God help him.”
She hands him back to the nurse exactly right when he tires, and before she goes, she stops beside my chair, just as she stopped in a doorway a lifetime ago when I was a forger she’d decided to despise.
“You did well,” Vera says. It’s the first uncomplicated praise Vera has ever given me. We both know it, though neither of us says so.
Angelina takes forty photographs through the NICU glass and starts an argument with Callum on the other side of it.
“The middle one is you,” she says to Nikita, holding her phone up to the incubator to compare. “You can see the scowl already. That’s your exact face when a spreadsheet doesn’t balance.”
“They all look like Nikita,” Callum says, and there’s something in how he says it, easy and certain, my brother standing at a NICU window claiming an uncle’s kids like he’s always belonged in the room. “Poor things.”
“The girl looks like Piper,” Angelina says. “She’s furious about the mask. That’s all Piper.”
I let them argue over my children’s faces through a pane of glass, my brother and Nikita’s sister. I think about how strange and enormous it is that these three will grow up with this, with people who fight over which of them looks like whom, with a family big enough to have sides.
Celine comes last, and she doesn’t ask for anything.
That surprises me. My whole life, my mother has walked into rooms needing something.
Now she sits down in the chair beside my bed and just holds the photo Angelina printed for her, three small faces under three sets of wires.
She doesn’t perform a feeling. She doesn’t make it about the years she missed. She doesn’t cry for an audience.
“They’re beautiful,” she says quietly. “You did a good job, Piper. I mean everything you built, not only what you survived today.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I don’t do anything. She doesn’t need me to. She stays for exactly the right amount of time and then she goes, and it’s the best visit she’s ever paid me.
The nurse comes to the incubators with a clipboard once the visitors have gone and it’s just Nikita and me between the three of them.
“I need names when you’re ready.”
Nikita looks at me, and I look back at him. We say them together, because we settled this weeks ago in the dark with my hand on my stomach.
“Our first son is Pyotr,” I say. We chose it for Platon, another old Russian name beginning the same way because using his name outright would embarrass him. He spent four years keeping a dead man’s family alive; he’ll understand what the name means when we tell him.
“Our second son is Arkadi,” Nikita says, and I take his hand. “For the man my father might have been if he’d allowed himself to love us properly. Our son gets the name and the tenderness my father refused.”
“Our daughter is Sofia,” I say. We chose it because it fit our fierce little girl the moment we said it aloud.
The nurse writes them down and leaves, and then it’s just us.
Nikita pulls a chair as close to mine as it will go, and we sit between the three incubators, each of us with one hand through a porthole resting on a back the size of a paperback, and for a second, neither of us says anything at all.
For as long as I can remember, I was certain I’d carry everything alone, because trusting only myself was safe. Almost everyone I let close eventually became one more thing to protect or one more exit to plan. I robbed a dead man’s house because taking what I needed was safer than asking for it.
Now there are five of us, three of them asleep under lights in plastic boxes I can’t lift them out of yet, and I don’t have or need an exit plan.
“Nikita.” He looks up, his enormous hand disappearing into an incubator to cover a whole tiny back. “I love you. I don’t think I’ve said it enough since the safe house. I’m saying it now, in front of the only witnesses who matter.”
“They’re asleep, and none of them can hold their own head up.”
“They’ll grow into it.” I can’t reach his face across the incubators, so I reach his free hand instead and hold it just as I held it the morning he asked me to marry him.
“I love you. That’s the whole sentence. No war on the other side of the door, no plan, and nothing I’m bracing for. I just love you.”
“I know,” he says, which is the most Nikita answer in the world, and then, because he’s learned, he says, “I love you too. All five of you. I spent four years sure I’d used up every good thing I was ever going to get.”
“You were wrong.”
“I was wrong about almost everything.” His thumb moves across the back of my hand.
“My father taught me I couldn’t afford to love anything I wasn’t ready to lose, and I believed him for thirty-six years.
I don’t believe him anymore.” He looks at his sons, then at our daughter scowling in her sleep behind the mask.
“Being wrong about that is the best thing I’ve ever done. ”
Sofia shifts beneath my hand. Pyotr makes a small sound from the next incubator, and Arkadi answers him. Nikita holds my other hand between them. All three monitors continue their steady rhythm while we sit with our children through the first night.