Epilogue
NIKITA
My best man is chasing my son away from the cake for the third time, and losing.
Pyotr has learned to run, which is to say he has learned to fall forward faster than gravity expects and has decided the cake is the most important object at his parents’ wedding.
He was the first of the three to walk. His brother, who came into the world second and smallest, is taking his time.
Arkadi still prefers a fast crawl to the risk of standing and watches Pyotr’s disasters with the wary respect of a boy who has learned that his brother tests the ground so he doesn’t have to.
Mila warned us they’d hit every milestone on their own separate schedules, and they have, each stubbornly on their own schedule.
Platon intercepts him a foot from the table, swings him up under one arm like a rolled carpet, and Pyotr shrieks with pure joy, having just discovered that being caught is better than getting the cake.
The man who kept a dead man’s empire breathing for four years without cracking is completely at the mercy of a one-year-old with frosting ambitions, and he doesn’t care who sees it.
Across the room, Piper’s maid of honor watches her fiancé carry Pyotr under one arm and makes no attempt to help him.
“He gets that from his mother,” Platon says, setting the boy down at a safe range. “He inherited the suicidal confidence from her.”
“He gets it from both of us.”
“He does.” Platon watches Pyotr regroup for another run. “You should know I’m not doing this at my own wedding. Maren and I have already agreed. We won’t put the cake within reach of anything that can walk.”
They announced the engagement two months ago, and no one at this reception pretended to be surprised, least of all me.
He asked me to stand for him when the time comes, in the same even voice he uses to report a wire transfer, and I said yes before he finished the sentence.
Neither of us mentioned that it took a war and four years of silence to get to a room where we could have normal lives.
We got married an hour ago, Piper and I, in the garden my mother planted, in front of everyone who survived the thing that nearly kept us from this.
We could have done it a year ago. We waited because Piper wanted the three of them old enough to be part of it, which they now are, in the sense that they attended and ruined a floral arrangement and one of them ate a program.
It was short. Piper wanted it short. She said she’d spent enough of her life performing paperwork that meant nothing and she wanted the one document that mattered to take four minutes and be true.
It took four minutes. It’s true. The court restored my legal identity months ago, and the signed marriage license is waiting on the desk in the study.
It’s the first marriage document with her name on it that isn’t a forgery.
Piper already picked out a deliberately crooked frame for the certified copy once it arrives.
The house doesn’t look like my father’s house anymore.
It hits all at once and then stays. There are toys on the floor of rooms that used to hold nothing a child could touch.
A stuffed rabbit sits on the eighteenth-century console in the front hall.
My father would have removed it. I leave it there.
Piper has put her own hand on every room.
She preserved what my mother built and softened what my father imposed.
The house has stopped feeling like a monument and started feeling like somewhere people live loudly.
The piano is the part I can’t walk past. It’s tuned now, in the music room with the good afternoon light, and Piper found a teacher who comes on Thursdays.
Last week, I stood in the doorway and listened to a stranger play the first Chopin those keys have carried since my mother died.
Hearing Chopin in that room hurt, but I stayed in the doorway until the teacher finished Piper’s lesson. The house has music in it again.
The rooms we argued about a lifetime ago are lived in now. The night everything turned, Piper stood in this house and told me the north room needed a rug before it needed shelves. I told her I didn’t know how to buy a rug, and she said that was obvious from the entire house.
There’s a rug in the north room now. She chose it. There are shelves too, low ones, set at a height where a one-year-old can pull books off, and Pyotr pulls every book off every afternoon, and no one reshelves them until he’s asleep because he’d just pull them out again.
Piper is across the room in a dress that accentuates her beauty, holding Sofia on her hip and talking to Callum about a workshop.
He’s two months into managing the day-to-day of the restoration space now, the one the foundation set up through the legitimate holdings, running the floor and the apprentice schedule under a master restorer the foundation hired to keep the standards honest, and he talks about it with his hands, loose and easy, because nothing before this ever fully belonged to him, and he knows the difference.
Sofia watches his hands and tries to grab them. She’s exactly as furious as she was the day she came out silent and scowling, and exactly as loud now that her lungs decided to cooperate. Sofia orders both boys around with the few words she knows, and they usually obey her.
Celine is dancing with Arkadi near the terrace doors, carefully but clearly delighted. She has been sober for a year. Piper still watches her occasionally, but she hasn’t had to intervene today.
Vera has stationed herself beside the gift table like a customs official.
She built this family as much as anyone in the room, and she won’t be moved from her post by a florist, a caterer, or the bride herself, and when Sofia toddles into her leg, she bends and lifts her without breaking her surveillance of the perimeter.
Angelina works the room with her camera, taking the pictures no one thinks to ask for, and every few minutes, she leans over to Callum to argue about which of the three looks most like which of us.
Callum says all three are Nikita. Angelina says the girl is pure Piper.
Neither of them will settle it, but neither of them really wants to.
Maren catches my eye across the room and lifts her glass half an inch, our old signal, the one that used to mean a target had walked into a gala and now means nothing more dangerous than hello.
Platon reaches her a second later with a plate she didn’t ask for and takes the champagne out of her hand before she can drink standing up, because she’s on her feet too much and he’s decided, in his quiet unarguable manner, that she’ll sit.
She lets him win, which she never used to do. He pulls out a chair. She sits. He stands behind her with one hand on the back of it and surveys the room as he used to survey a perimeter, except the only thing he’s guarding now is her afternoon.
Later, Piper finds me at the edge of it all, and we step out onto the terrace where the noise falls away behind us.
We don’t talk about the marina or the island. We already said everything we needed to say about both, once, start to finish, and we don’t need it again.
We talk about next week instead. We talk about the trip we keep postponing, the babies’ checkup on Tuesday, and whether Platon and Maren will choose a wedding date before the children start school.
“Sofia said another real word this morning,” Piper says. “Or I’m almost sure she did.”
“Which word did she say?”
“She said logistics.” She grins. “Emphatically. Having her sit on your lap during meetings is making an impact.”
I laugh. “She’s going to be a problem.”
“She’s going to be exactly like me, you’re going to love it, and it’s going to serve you right.
” She leans into my side, giving me her weight now instead of guarding it, a thing she had to learn.
“I keep waiting to get used to this. The quiet. A calendar with nothing on it but a checkup and a trip we’ll probably cancel.
I spent years braced for the next thing, and the next thing keeps turning out to be ordinary. ”
“You’ll get there. You’ll trust it.”
“I already do.” She says it plainly. “That’s the part I can’t get used to.”
Pyotr shrieks from inside the house, followed by Sofia shouting no and Arkadi clapping for both of them. Piper relaxes whenever she hears them. The bracing to act that used to be instinct is gone now.
I take Piper’s hand and open the terrace door. Pyotr is heading for the cake again, and Platon is already moving to intercept him. Piper laughs and pulls me into the room.
I go with her. My family is waiting. I don’t need anything but them and the life we have now.