Chapter Nineteen
Lauren
I hear them before I see them.
Hannah’s laugh first—that particular pitch she reaches when something has genuinely undone her—and then underneath it, Nikolai’s. Low, unhurried, entirely unguarded. I don’t think I’ve heard him laugh like that before. Not once in all the time I’ve known him.
I stop on the stairs.
They’re bent over the kitchen table, a sheet of paper between them.
Hannah is pointing at something on the page, shaking her head with the authority of a critic who has seen enough.
Nikolai picks up the pencil with exaggerated focus—game face, shoulders squared, like this time will be different—and begins again.
It is, somehow, worse.
“It’s a potato with legs!” Hannah shrieks.
Nikolai puts the pencil down and laughs until his shoulders shake.
I grip the banister.
Something about watching the scene unfold—the ease of it, the complete absence of performance on either side—opens up a feeling I’ve not experienced before.
Not warmth, exactly. Something more complicated.
The joy is real and it arrives with a shadow attached, because every moment I watch them together is also a moment I’m aware of everything Hannah doesn’t know yet.
Every laugh is something she’ll one day understand differently, looking back.
And the more I let myself believe in this, the more there is to lose.
The laughter settles into breathless recovery, Hannah still shaking her head at the drawing, Nikolai still defending it with a straight face.
I stand there a moment longer, watching, not quite ready to walk into the light of it.
Then I come downstairs anyway.
“Time for bed, baby,” I say, stepping into the kitchen.
Hannah looks up from the sketchbook, predictably betrayed. “Do I have to?”
“We can draw more tomorrow,” Nikolai says, before I can answer. “Deal?”
Hannah considers this with the gravity of a boardroom negotiation. Then she nods, closes the sketchbook, and tucks it under her arm alongside Mr. Brummy like she’s securing important documents.
I meet Nikolai’s eyes over her head. He looks quietly pleased with himself.
I follow Hannah upstairs. She gets into bed without much protest, Mr. Brummy already tucked under her arm by the time I sit on her bedside.
Five minutes later, she’s out.
I close her bedroom door behind me and stand in the hallway for a moment, listening to the quiet. Then I head back downstairs.
Nikolai is on the couch, a mug of tea in his hands, watching the city through the window. The lamp beside him is the only light on. He looks up when I come in—just briefly, the way he always tracks movement—and then back to the window.
I sit beside him.
“You’re good with her,” I say.
“I’m trying.” He says it simply, without false modesty or performance.
I watch his profile. The lamp throws warm light across the line of his jaw, the ink at his collar. He’s let the shirt hang open and I don’t bother pretending not to notice. Four years of deprivation will do that to a person’s self-restraint.
He catches me looking and says nothing. Just holds my gaze with that particular stillness of his—patient, certain, waiting to see what I’ll do with it.
I close the space between us.
The kiss starts slow. Unhurried, like we’ve agreed without speaking to take our time with this one.
His hand comes up to my face and I lean into it, breathing him in.
There’s tenderness underneath the wanting, something that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the specific grief of having lost this and found it again.
His hands begin to move and I stop thinking.
“Bedroom,” I manage. “Now.”
He sets the mug down, stands, and picks me up in one motion—an arm under my knees, my shoulder against his chest—and carries me like the decision has already been made. I laugh despite myself, the sound escaping before I can stop it.
“Show-off,” I say into his neck.
He doesn’t dignify that with a response.
The bedroom door closes behind us, the city disappears, and for a while there is nothing but this—his hands, his mouth, the particular way he says my name when everything else has fallen away.
Unhurried this time.
Like we both have something to prove that has nothing to do with urgency.
Afterward, I lie with my head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat slow.
His hand moves through my hair—steady, absent, the way you do something you’ve done a thousand times. Outside, the city hums its low continuous note.
I think about how strange it is to be here.
How a month ago my life was the careful architecture I’d spent four years building—routines and work and Hannah and the specific numbness that had started to feel like peace.
And now all of it has been taken apart and reassembled into something I don’t have a name for yet.
Something I didn’t let myself want because wanting it felt like inviting loss.
His chest rises and falls under my cheek.
I know what’s coming. Not the details—I don’t have those—but the shape of it.
The quiet we’re living in has an edge to it.
Nikolai feels it too; I can see it in the way he runs his security checks, the way his jaw tightens when he thinks I’m not watching.
Whatever is moving toward us is getting closer.
So, I stay here, in this moment, in the warm dark, and I let myself have it.
The pain will find us soon enough.
Tonight, I choose this instead.