Epilogue
AVELINA
Sofia scampers into the den with a tin of markers clutched to her chest like it’s a valuable treasure. The lid wobbles precariously, a waterfall of color threatening to spill across the floor.
She skids to a halt at Viktor’s elbow, her eyes bright with the kind of hope that makes my throat tight.
“Please can I put rainbows on your tattoos, Viktor?” she asks with the same casual directness she’d use to ask for a glass of water.
No hesitation. No preamble. Just a child’s straight line to the thing her heart wants most.
My breath catches. Viktor’s tattoos have always been sacred territory—those intricate black and gray lines that climb from wrist to elbow in sharp geometry and shadowed script. They’re part of his armor, his carefully controlled world, and Sofia is asking to paint them with the chaos of childhood.
“Sofia, honey,” I start gently, because some things are still fragile for Viktor. “He might not—”
“Yes,” he announces, interrupting me.
The word drops like a stone into still water, sending ripples through everything I thought I knew.
My head snaps to his. “Yes?”
He looks at Sofia first—really looks at her, the way he does when he’s reading between the lines of what someone needs but can’t say.
Then his gaze drops to his forearm, where those familiar patterns tell stories I’m still learning to read.
“If we use the washable pens,” he adds, ever practical, but there’s something soft threading through his voice.
“And we can stop if my skin says no or starts feeling too buzzy.”
Sofia’s face transforms, lighting up like the sun breaking at dawn, and my chest goes warm and tight all at once. This is Viktor choosing joy over control. Choosing Sofia’s happiness over his own comfort.
“Okay! These are the washable markers.” Sofia scrambles up onto the chair beside him, patting the table like she’s setting up the most important art studio in the world.
“Arm on the mat, please,” she instructs, suddenly all business and concentration.
“And once I start, no moving. Artists need steady canvases.”
I suppress my grin.
He settles his arm on the table with the same careful precision he brings to everything he does, but there’s something different in his posture now. Looser. Like he’s consciously choosing to trust and to be vulnerable.
I watch this moment. This man who flinches from unexpected touch offering his skin as Sofia’s canvas. And my heart is shaking and singing at the same time.
She studies his tattoos with the serious consideration of a master painter approaching a blank canvas. “Do you want to choose the colors?” she asks, because even in her excitement, she remembers that Viktor needs to have choices and needs to feel in control.
“Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet,” he says without a moment’s hesitation, and something in my chest cracks open with tenderness.
“Okay,” she replies solemnly, selecting her first marker like she’s choosing a tool for the most important task in her whole little life.
She starts with red, carefully drawing a semi-circle above the black lines of the clouds in his tattoos. Viktor watches her work, his gaze tracking each deliberate stroke.
I hold my breath waiting for him to tense up, to say it’s too much.
But his expression never tightens. Instead, he looks fascinated, like he’s watching magic unfold right on his own skin.
Orange follows, then yellow, Sofia’s small hands move with the intense focus of someone performing surgery. She understands the weight of what she’s been trusted with—this chance to add beauty to someone who’s spent so long believing color was his enemy.
Viktor shifts only to let her turn his arm, accommodating her need for the perfect angle.
She’s slow and deliberate with him, the way she is with all precious things. And when she gets to green, she starts humming—a soft, wordless tune she’s creating just for this moment—and Viktor actually tilts his head, listening like her voice is the most beautiful music he’s ever heard.
The green bleeds slightly over the yellow, and I tense, waiting for his reaction. But Viktor just watches, his mouth soft with something that might be wonder.
Blue comes next, then indigo, each color building on the last until a rainbow is blooming across his tattoos like a storm of color breaking through gray clouds. Like Sofia’s painting him back to life, stroke by stroke, and he’s letting her.
“There,” she announces at last, sitting back to admire her work. Her cheeks are flushed with pride and concentration. “Now your tattoos looks…happy.”
Viktor lifts his arm, studying the transformation with the same intensity he once brought to avoiding color entirely. The markers have wandered outside the lines in places, and the colors are slightly uneven, applied with the enthusiastic imperfection that only comes from a child’s hands.
It should look messy.
It should feel wrong.
But his mouth softens into something that looks like peace. “Yes,” he says quietly, and his voice carries a kind of awe I’ve never heard from him before. “It’s happy now.”
Sofia grins—the satisfied smile of an artist whose vision has come to life—and hops down from the chair. She rushes off to rouse Queenie from her afternoon nap, leaving Viktor and me alone in this moment of transformation.
I lean against the table, studying him as he turns his wrist this way and that, watching how the afternoon light catches each imperfect stroke of color.
This is Viktor choosing love over fear.
Choosing Sofia’s joy over his own rigid control.
Choosing to trust that sometimes the most beautiful things come from letting go.
“Viktor?” I murmur, my voice thick with emotions I don’t have names for.
“Mmm?” His eyes are still on his arm, still marveling at what Sofia has created.
“I love you, Viktor.” The words come out rough with feeling.
I love him for doing this for Sofia, for understanding what she needed in a way that goes deeper than words.
I love him for the courage it took to sit still while chaos painted itself across his carefully ordered world.
I love him for being exactly who he is. Rigid and flexible.
Controlled and surrendering. Black and white and every color of the rainbow.
He turns toward me then, and the smile that spreads across his face is radiant, unguarded, and completely his. My heart forgets how to beat properly.
“I love you too, Avelina.” He says it like a prayer, like a promise, and like the most important truth he’s ever spoken.
“Happy?” I ask. Because I need to hear him say it, need to know that this moment is as perfect as it feels.
He looks down at the rainbow on his arm, then back at me, and the contentment in his eyes is so complete it takes my breath away. “Yes,” he sighs, and the word carries the weight of every wall he’s torn down, every fear he’s faced, and every choice he’s made to let love in. “Wholly and completely.”
And I think—no, I know—those are the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard, painted in every color of Sofia’s careful rainbow across the canvas of his willing heart.
I don’t notice it at first. Not really.
It’s Monday morning, and I’m still working at the marketing company while Babulya helps look after Sofia and Leon. I’m halfway down the stairs, juggling a tote bag, a thermos, and Queenie who refuses to be put down, when something catches the edge of my vision.
Viktor is at the bottom of the landing in an all-black suit as usual, getting ready to head to the casino for a meeting. Except for the small, clean line of a red handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket.
It’s not a screaming, bright red. It’s more muted, like the heart of a pomegranate seed. And it’s folded with the precision he brings to everything—the square sits perfectly even, no corner daring to misbehave. But it’s there. Color. On Viktor.
My breath catches for just a moment before I tell myself I’m reading too much into it.
Queenie flicks her tail like she approves. She’s been watching Viktor bloom alongside Sofia these past months, and I swear that this cat knows something about healing that the rest of us are still learning.
With one final glance at that impossible splash of red, I tell myself it’s nothing and hurry on with our day, knowing I’ll be late if I linger.
A quick kiss to Sofia and Leon while Babulya chatters away in Russian about how the children will thrive without my hovering, and then I’m out the door.
But all day, I carry the image of that handkerchief with me like a special secret I don’t want to share.
The next morning, it’s orange.
Viktor is in the kitchen helping prepare breakfast, cutting strawberries into exact halves the way Sofia loves—because he’s learned her language of comfort, her need for sameness.
He wears a black shirt with sleeves rolled up and black trousers, but there in his pocket sits a small square of russet orange.
He moves through the room the way he always does, measured and steady, settling into his morning rhythm.
But now there’s this tiny rebellion of color against the controlled black of his world, and something in my chest flutters like a bird testing its wings.
On Wednesday, a small square of dark yellow catches the morning light and throws it back onto his throat when his head turns.
He stands in the garden, surveying the neatly gridded beds. The handkerchief sits in his pocket like a captured piece of sunlight, and I watch him from the kitchen window longer than I should.
When he comes back indoors, he doesn’t comment.
Neither do I.
But the silence feels full now, pregnant with something neither of us is ready to name.
By Thursday, I’m looking for it before I see him, my heart doing this ridiculous little skip of anticipation.
Green. Not bright like neon—that would still be too much and too loud for him. It’s more like moss after rain, soft and deep.