Epilogue
ROMAN
Six Months Later
The house is loud with good noise. Hammers.
Laughter. A rolling cart squeaks down the hall.
Mina stands in the doorway with paint chips fanned like a deck.
She holds court with the decorator and three movers who wait for her signal.
I stand behind her with a boy on each hip and a stain on my shirt that used to be oatmeal.
She kisses the air near my cheek so she doesn’t smudge me. “This wall,” she tells the crew, “pulls the light wrong. Move the bookcase again.”
They nod. The case rises. The floor creaks. The twins clap as if a parade has gone by.
The nannies hover a step back. They are good and kind and organized. I hired them because Mina asked. She worked without a net for too long, and she deserves more help than her mother can provide at her age.
I shouldn’t think of it that way—her mother is four years younger than me. But Jennifer has her own life now, and I refuse to impose when I can hire help.
I still carry my sons myself as often as I can. Xander rides my right hip. Yuri hangs on my left and tries to steal my watch. They have learned to walk, but most of their walking is getting underfoot of the construction crew that Mina’s hired.
Xander twists and points at the rug, so I set him on his feet.
He toddles toward a stack of blocks with the focus of a general.
Yuri watches, decides no, and tucks his face into my collar.
I am a large man with more scars than I plan to count.
A boy hiding in my neck still makes me feel like I’ve won something big.
Mina lifts a hand. The movers adjust two inches and wait. “There,” she says. She squints, nods once, and glances at me, so I give her the smallest smile. She smiles back and keeps moving.
It’s been like this for weeks.
Remodeling is inconvenience turned into a plan.
Dust finds places I did not know existed.
A hallway disappears for a day and returns with a better idea.
The alarm panel beeps while a man rewires it so it cannot be tricked.
The dining table arrived too big for the door, so a steady hand took off a leg outside and put it back on in the hall.
The security team twitched until I told them to breathe. This is not a siege. This is a future.
“What do you think of this finish?” Mina asks as she holds up swatches.
They are identical, as far as I’m concerned. Brown is brown. But each one has a different name, and she appears to think of them as different. This feels like a test I can’t pass, when it should be a test I can’t fail.
“Which are you leaning toward?”
“I like this one,” she says, pointing to the brown one. “But the undertones in this one could make all the difference with the lighting.” She points to the other brown one.
“Hmm,” I mutter, hoping to sound convincing. “I think you’re right about the lighting for that one.”
“Yeah, but in a good way or a bad way?”
Crap. “In a good way.” I hope.
She smiles. Success! “That’s what I was thinking. Good call. Okay, guys, we’re going with this one…”
I sit in the rocking chair near Xander, while Mina takes her crew elsewhere.
Yuri sits on my lap, happy just to sit there.
“Boys, marriage, in my experience, is a multitude of land mines that might be nothing at all or could be an hour-long discussion of the undertones of identical browns. If she wants to move a wall, you move a wall. If she wants to keep the old stove because it heats the kettle fast, you keep it. Those are the little things that keep her happy.”
I readjust Yuri because he’s getting big enough to cut off my circulation if he’s not sitting right.
“The things I care about, I’ll dig in about.
I care about sight lines. I care that the front steps hold a stroller and three bags without making anyone dance to find them.
Everything else is her kingdom. Remember that. ”
I set Yuri down, because Xander is reaching for him, and the pair play with balls together. The contractor pops his head in, scanning the room for what, I don’t know. He smiles at the kids in a way that looks like a wince and then like a grin. “Little bosses, eh?”
“They get it from their mother.”
Mina hears and tosses me a look down the hallway. I raise my hands like a man caught stealing cookies. The men laugh, and then she grins. “Don’t you forget it.”
Later on, we’re in the kitchen, while the construction crew does things to the boys’ room.
It’s been like this for a while—moving rooms to accommodate the latest decision.
Jennifer teases that I’ve opened a can of worms and that Mina will never stop redecorating because she’s never had the chance to do it before now.
When she gets bored of ordering them around, Mina leans into my shoulder. “You sure you want this chaos? It will be another week if I’m lucky. Maybe two.”
She means months, not weeks, and that’s still an underestimation, if the plaster dust is any indication.
“I want it all. Put your hands on everything and make it yours.”
“Even when you can’t find your desk for three days?”
“I can write at the kitchen table. Or on the stairs. I have done worse with less.”
She laughs and tucks two chips back into the stack. “You are patient with me.”
“I’d give you the world if I could. This is just a house.”
She kisses my cheek, and that’s enough for me to put up with living in a construction zone for at least another four months.
The boys pull free at the door and make it three steps before they fall into each other and argue in a language only they understand.
I separate knees from noses and set them on their feet.
Teresa takes their hands and starts the tour toward the garden.
They look back to make sure we are watching. We are.
If someone had told me I would love this part of my life the most, I would have laughed.
I spent years building rooms where other people could forget the world.
I did not believe I would ever get a room like that for myself.
Now the whole house is a room like that, even with banging and dust and a sofa going through a door sideways.
The rest of the world has faded into background noise and little else. It is more than I thought I could ask for.
In the afternoon, Leon arrives. I haven’t heard from him in a long while, and when he brought up the meeting, I was happy to take it, but he didn’t provide details as to why he wanted a meeting, which is odd for him.
He steps into the entry and stops. He looks at the plastic on the floor and the scaffolding that kisses the ceiling and the toy truck lodged under a chair.
He looks at me and smiles the way an older brother smiles when he catches a younger one happy.
“You look like a man who went to a market and bought everything.”
“And then some.”
“Good.” He takes my hand in both of his and squeezes. “You deserve this.”
“I did not think I would hear that from you.”
“I did not think I would say it.”
We walk to the library because the crew has not touched it yet. It still smells like paper and lemon oil. We sit. I pour whiskey. He drinks and smiles as he studies my face. “It has been some time, and I hope time heals wounds enough for me to ask this. What happened with Vitaly?”
Bold of him to ask, but then again, we are bold men. “Is that what you came to discuss?”
“One of two things I came to discuss. I know he is dead. I suspect you had a hand in it. But there is only so much that rumor allows me to piece together.”
Of all the men breathing, Leon Valivov is one of the few I respect. So, I tell him the truth. He knows enough about Vitaly to know I’d be lying if I prettied up the tale, so I give it to him plain.
Leon does not interrupt. When I finish, he nods once. “You were right,” he says. “Olga could not have seen that and remained in love with you. She would have broken that night. She would not have stood there with a knife, ready to finish things had you not done the job.”
“Olga, for all her kindness…” I’m not sure how to end that sentence. “I agree. It would have broken her. She was too gentle for this world.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “She used to tell me you were two men. The one who smiled at her and the one the world needed. She believed the second killed the first when you married Bridgette, but she was wrong about that. I see now that the first survived and built a house where he can live.”
“He had help.”
“Oh?”
“Mina is—”
“The right woman for you.”
I chuckle. “Picked up on that, eh?”
He laughs, full-throated and open. “The construction vehicles dotting your lawn gave that away before I even walked inside and saw the messes. Roman Ekimov does not upend his family home for just anyone.”
“This place might have been the Ekimov family home before, but now, it’s starting to feel like a home for my family.”
“I am glad for you, truly.” Noise from the rest of the house reaches us, distracting us both briefly. His smile fades, and the air shifts. “Now, for the other reason. I came because I need help.”
I nod. “How can I help?”
“Trouble overseas,” he says. “I need hands I trust and a mind that stays calm when others go loud.”
Considering he works with his family overseas, this could go a number of ways. “Business or family?”
“Both,” he says. “Isn’t it always?”
“You have people—”
“I do. They are good. They are not you. More to the point, my people are also my family’s people. I could hire outside help, but there’s no one I trust more than you, and since I am the secondary caretaker of your family, I hoped I could cash in that favor before you leave this mortal coil.”
I cannot see my face, but I know my expression tells him he must be joking. “First of all, the threat from Vitaly is over—”
“Da, but just in case some overenthusiastic gunrunner gets the better of you, I still consider myself to be in that position.”
“Fair enough. Secondly, there are no favors between family. We do for each other as we would want done for us. So, tell me everything.”
He does, and I am surprised he doesn’t want to handle this himself. But he explains, “The doctor says it’s my heart. If I get too riled up, that could be the end.”
“I didn’t know you’re sick—”
“I’m not,” he says with a sigh. It’s the same sigh strong men give when they know they’re beat. “But my cardiologist is paid to worry, and in the past few years, he’s worrying a lot.”
He’s scared, and he doesn’t want to admit it. Can’t blame him. “I’ll handle it, Leon. You have my word.”
He stands and grips my shoulder. “Thank you. I will not forget this.”
I see him out, and when Mina joins me at the door, I have one question for her. “How do you feel about Moscow in winter?”
The End