Chapter 25 - Darya
One Year Later
“I’m going to check in on the boys before I go,” I say, dropping a kiss on Galina’s soft, powdery cheek.
She catches my hand before I can pull away, squeezing it once with those elegant, skeletal fingers.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.
That’s something I’ve learned about Galina Zakharov over the past year—that her silences are as articulate as most people’s sentences, and that a squeeze of the hand from her means something in the vicinity of you are doing well, and I see it, and I won’t embarrass either of us by making a production of it.
I’ve come to love her for it, among other things.
I leave her to her breakfast and her book, and I make my way through the manor.
This is my home now, too. That’s still the first thing I think, every morning, moving through these rooms. Not because it surprises me anymore—I know every inch of what this place has become, because I have made it so—but because I can still see beneath it, the way I can see beneath overpainting on a damaged canvas.
I can still see the hotel it used to be.
The sealed, preserved, uninhabited quality of it.
The place Anton had been keeping himself in, like a piece in storage, protected from the light.
That place is gone.
What’s here instead is a home, which is a different thing entirely.
The walls of the drawing room are the deep, saturated green I’d fought Galina on for two weeks before she’d conceded it was the right choice and pretended she’d agreed from the beginning.
The library has new floor-to-ceiling shelving to accommodate the combined mass of our respective collections, which turned out to be the primary logistical challenge of merging our lives.
I pass the door to what used to be a spare room and is now our son’s nursery, though Rurik has not once in four months of life actually slept there for a full night.
I push it open anyway, out of habit, and look at the room I designed for a person I hadn’t met yet; its walls the color of a twilight sky, the mobile above the crib that Nadya sent from New York, a chaotic assemblage of tiny moons and stars and one inexplicable silver fox that she’d included with a note reading So he grows up knowing there’s a world out here for him to rule.
The crib is empty and impeccably made because our son has opinions about where he sleeps, and a crib is not among his preferred options.
He prefers to be on or immediately adjacent to his father.
I shut the door and continue down the hall, my feet walking a familiar path to Anton’s study. I can hear them inside it before I peer in through the door.
Rurik shrieks with delight, which is extremely different from his hungry shriek, the tired shriek, and the I am displeased with the current situation, mama shriek, all of which I’ve become fluent in over the past four months with a speed that continues to astonish me.
This is the delighted shriek. This is the one that means something has happened that Rurik genuinely and unreservedly finds wonderful.
I know, before I reach the doorway, what that something is.
I stop in the doorway.
The office looks nothing like it did the morning I first walked into this manor and began mentally dismantling every beige, soulless, hospitality-grade choice that Anton Zakharov had been living among without apparent complaint.
The walls are a dark, warm charcoal now, the woodwork painted out in the same tone so the room feels like the inside of something rather than just a room.
The rug I sourced from an estate sale in Marblehead is burgundy and ivory and impractically beautiful, which was the point.
The shelves are full. The desk, which is original to the house and the one thing I hadn’t touched because even I could see it was magnificent, sits at the far end of it, and on the floor in front of the desk—
The Pakhan of the Zakharov Bratva is on his hands and knees on my beautiful rug, roaring like a lion.
And not metaphorically. He roars a low, theatrical sound that he escalates incrementally with each repetition, his head swinging from side to side, while our four-month-old son regards him from the nest of blankets he’s been arranged in with an expression of absolute transported joy.
There is a book open on the floor between them.
I can see, from the doorway, that it’s one of the Russian folk tales—the illustrated collection Anastasia gave us at my baby shower, from her own childhood, with its spine cracked and its pages soft from handling.
Anton is acting out a story from it. He’s on all fours, acting out a children’s book for a four-month-old who cannot yet understand a single word of it, and Rurik is shrieking with laughter like it’s the finest entertainment he’s ever encountered.
Which, to be fair, it probably is.
I lean against the doorframe.
I’m transfixed as Anton makes the sound again, deeper this time, and how our son’s whole body participates in his response—with legs kicking, arms windmilling, and his giggles bouncing off the charcoal walls.
I don’t want to make a sound. It isn’t because I’m scared, because nothing about this life of ours is fragile. But it is precious. It is the most precious thing.
Besides, Anton feels me there anyway. He always does.
He looks at me across the room, across the rug and the open book and our delighted, oblivious son, and his face does the thing.
I’ve been on the receiving end of that expression for month after month, and I still don’t entirely know what to do with it, but I bask in its light.
His eyes ask, How long have you been standing there, beautiful?
Mine answer, Long enough.
And then, because I know him, and because our eyes have been having conversations for a year now without needing any other medium—I am so terribly in love with you. Still. More. Take that information and do something worthwhile with it, my love.
He gets up from the floor with a fluid ease I’ll never stop finding unfairly attractive, because he’s forty-five years old and he moves with the agility of a swan, which is simply rude. He crosses the room to me, and I let him come, beholding him, adoring him.
He stops when he’s close enough that I have to tip my chin to keep his face.
He looks down at me. I look up at him.
“You’re going to be late to the atelier,” he says.
“I’m never late.”
“Darya.”
“I’ll go soon,” I laugh. But I don’t turn towards the door.
No, I do what I want to: I take his hand instead and pull him back toward the middle of the room, back toward the rug and the book and Rurik.
I steer Anton back to where he was, and when we reach the blankets I bend at the waist and press a kiss to each line in his forehead—one, two, three, like a ritual to scratch the itch in his bra—and then, because I’m already down here, because my son is looking up at me with those sage-green eyes and those ridiculous lashes he’s inherited from his papa, and an expression of beatific contentment, I drop to my knees.
I tuck myself into Anton’s lap.
He folds around me without being asked, his arms coming around both of us, his chin finding the top of my head.
Rurik looks between us with curiosity that he’s inherited from me.
He reaches out one starfish hand and closes it around my finger with a grip that continues to astonish me, that such a small hand can hold on so tightly.
And I can’t help but think about how I’d walked into this as a game, once upon a time.
How certain I’d been of the moves I would make, and my own skill at playing by hand, and the outcome I intended to produce.
How amusing I’d found it, that first evening in the church with his ring on my finger and chaos erupting around us—how certain I’d been that I had the measure of him, and of myself, and of what this was going to be.
The certainty I feel now is nothing like that. It’s implicit and omnipresent.
It doesn’t need to be managed, strategized, or protected from the truth.
Anything can be a game. Everything doesn’t have to be.
This isn’t.
If I’m honest with myself—and I am, more often than not, these days—it hasn’t been for a very long time.
*****
THE END