Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER TWELVE
T HEY HAD A proper Christmas morning there in front of the Christmas tree in that house in Iowa, fire blazing and carols playing, and Constance pronounced it perfect.
Anax found he agreed.
They ate cinnamon rolls before the fire. They drank hot chocolate piled high with whipped cream and marshmallows. They watched Natalia play with the wrapping paper and ignore the gifts that Constance had set there beneath the tree.
And later, as Natalia napped, Anax held his wife close before that same fire. She put her head on his shoulder and his heart was still pounding hard, but at least now he knew it was a music they were making together.
“Would you really move here?” she asked softly. “And live here, forever?”
“Absolutely, if that was what you wanted,” he said at once, without having to think it through. “I can live anywhere.”
She shifted, turning so she could look at him.
“I promise,” he told her. “All I need is you, koritsi .”
“That is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever said to me,” she told him with a smile. “But I don’t think I belong here anymore. I wish I did. I expected to always feel at home here. Something changed in me, too, this last year.” She blew out a breath. “There’s a whole world out there and I know you’ve seen it. I want to see it, too.”
He pulled her into his lap and kissed her thoroughly. “Then I will show it to you,” he promised.
And that was what he did.
By Epiphany in January, the Greek Christmas, it was clear to them both that Constance was pregnant again. A test only confirmed what they already knew. So they made the most of it.
They traveled everywhere together for the first six months of her pregnancy. And then, for the last three months, they settled down in Athens so Anax could have his team of physicians see to her every need.
Though she insisted that they find somewhere to stay that was not a soulless set of windows with black and chrome accents.
“I love you,” she said, “but that apartment is depressing.”
The funny thing was that he agreed. Because he was a different man. She had made him see his life in a completely new way.
And when they went back to Christmas in Iowa that year, they brought their infant son with them.
They kept up the holiday tradition. Constance gave him three more babies, all of them boys. Natalia, as she aged, considered herself much more worldly and superior to her wild pack of baby brothers, though she could occasionally admit she loved them dearly.
On Christmas Eve, she lectured them all extensively on how they should stand quietly in the pew in the church in Halburg. How they should pay attention to the Virgin Mary especially.
“Because,” she would tell her brothers loftily, “that was Mommy. And that was me.”
Evgenia, though she perhaps never forgave herself for her role as a mother, more than made up for any shortcomings as a grandmother. She doted not only on Anax’s children, but on the rough-and-tumble passel of babies that Stavros and Vasiliki produced, too.
They all spent many fine holidays on the island together, where the cousins raced about without a care, the way he and Vasiliki never had.
“Well done, brother,” Vasiliki said on one such occasion. “You made us a family, after all.”
Anax looked at her, and then at their mother, who was holding the youngest of the brood. He looked at his beautiful wife, who was talking animatedly to Stavros, still dressed as if she didn’t have access to the finest wardrobe in all the world.
By now he knew she took a certain pride in that. In keeping her head on straight , as she liked to call it.
The ways he loved her astonished him daily. He tried to show her each and every night.
“We have always been a family, Vasiliki,” he said then, slinging an arm over his sister as he guided her back inside to all that warmth, all that heat. That great and beautiful song they all sang together, season after season and year after year. “Only now, we can celebrate it.”
And that night, that was precisely what he did with his beautiful wife, in their room with the door locked against curious hands, where he took her apart again and again.
She did the same in turn, rendering them both little more than stars out there in the sky.
Shining for each other for all eternity, as if they’d been made to sparkle.
And when they settled back down into flesh and bone, he did it all over again.
“This is it,” she sighed into his neck. “The happiest of happy-ever-afters, my love.”
“I love you,” he said, the way he did so often now, holding her near.
And the real miracle, he knew, was that he meant it. That he had spent these years learning how to say what he loved, how to let his heart lead him, and how to accept love in return.
How to sing out that love at the top of his voice, every day.
And it was all because of her.
“I love you, koritsi mou ,” he told her then, as he built them back up again, and aimed them toward the stars. “And this is the happiest ever after that could ever be, or ever will be.”
But he proved it every day for the rest of their lives, just to be sure.
Because Anax Ignatios had empires to run, rivals to decimate with his innate superiority, and whole worlds to claim—but he had only the one Constance.
And she was his everything.
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