Iris
There's a picture in my hand and I can't put it down.
I've been trying for three days. I set it on my nightstand and take it back before the lamp goes off.
I prop it against the sugar jar while I make tea and then pick it up again before the kettle finishes, because apparently even the sugar jar can't be trusted with it. It lives in my cardigan pocket now.
It's not even a good picture. Twelve weeks and three days of person, rendered in gray static, a little bean of a human with a nose that the sonographer swore was a nose and that I privately think might be a smudge.
The women of the house passed it around the kitchen like a relic.
Ma held it the longest and said nothing at all, just pressed it flat against her heart and said a silent prayer before reluctantly handing it back to me.
My brothers know now. We told them after the scan, once there was a picture to show them of their niece or nephew.
Killian stared at the grainy image for a full minute and then announced, hoarsely, that the baby had my chin, which is not information a twelve-week scan contains.
Aidan started a list of names and was banned from the list by unanimous vote before he reached the Cs.
Connor hugged me so carefully, you'd think I was made of glass.
Rafferty asked, once, quietly, whether there was anyone he needed to find.
I said no, and he looked at me for a long moment and let it go, which cost him something, and I love him for paying it.
Liam said almost nothing. That's the part I keep returning to.
Liam, who watches the house even when he's watching the television, who has spent the last few days rebuilding the estate's security from the wiring up for reasons nobody will explain to me, took the scan picture in his big careful hands, looked at it, looked at me, and said, "Right.
" Just that. Right. And then he kissed the top of my head like he did when I was seven and went out to the garage.
Grace watched him go with an expression I couldn't read, which frightened me more than shouting would have.
So that's where we are. Saturday morning, half ten, the kitchen briefly mine because Ma is with Tanya, helping with the newest member of the family.
I'm at the counter with a cup of tea going cold and the photograph propped against the teapot where I can see it, and I'm talking to it quietly, because that's a thing I do now.
"Your grandmother thinks I don't know she's knitting," I tell the grainy bean. "Everyone in this house thinks I don't know things. It's genuinely insulting."
The bean declines to comment. It's very like its father that way.
And there it is, the thought I ration. I allow myself thoughts about Yakob in small amounts, the way you'd take something strong for pain, because if I let it run loose it goes everywhere.
This picture is the only thing in the world that is his and mine together.
Not a memory, which fades and edits itself.
A thing. Gray and white and real, printed on glossy paper.
Proof of everything that happened. Proof that he walked away a lifetime ago and left something of himself behind that no amount of time can take back.
Someone knocks on the front door.
I straighten up so fast my tea slops onto the counter.
Nobody ever knocks. The front door of the Orlov estate sits behind a wall, a gate, a camera system my brother has spent the last few days turning into something out of a space program, and a rotating cast of large men with earpieces.
Guests are announced by radio before their car finishes the drive. Deliveries go to the gatehouse. The priest calls ahead. In twenty-seven years I have heard that knocker used maybe a dozen times, and at least four of those were Rafferty locked out in just his socks.
The knock comes again. Unhurried. The sound of a man with nowhere else he intends to be.
I'm still staring down the hall when Liam appears at the other end of it.
He's come from the study, in his shirtsleeves, and he isn't hurrying either.
That's the thing that turns my heart over before anything else does.
My eldest brother heard an unannounced knock at his front door, and he is walking toward it like a man expecting the post.
He stops at the mouth of the hall. He looks at me.
There's something working behind his face, something he's holding back with determination, and underneath it, so faint I might be inventing it, the ghost of the smile he used to get when we were small and he knew where the Christmas presents were hidden.
"It's for you," Liam says.
I don't remember crossing the hall. I know I do it, because the door gets closer, and Liam swings it open just as I reach it.
Some distant sensible region of my brain observes that I'm still holding the photograph, that I should put it in my pocket, that I should check my hair, that I should assemble my face into something that isn’t desperate hope. I don't do any of it.
Yakob is standing on the step.
In daylight. That's the first impossible thing, before the rest of it hits me.
I have seen this man materialize out of darkness, out of doorways, out of the corner of a cell in Sicily.
I have never once seen him arrive. And here he is, standing in the flat, honest light of the morning where any camera can find him and every one of my brothers' men can see, holding, and this is the second impossible thing, an armful of flowers.
Irises. Of course they're irises. Dozens of them, purple and gold, wrapped in brown paper, slightly crushed on one side as if he held them too hard between the car and the steps.
"That's very on the nose," I hear myself say.
"I know," he says. "The woman in the shop said the same thing and asked me to reconsider."
His voice. For six weeks I have been losing the exact grain of it, the way it sits low and unhurried under everything, and having it back in my ears does something to my knees that I refuse to show him.
He looks the same and not the same.
Same stillness, same flint gray eyes that take the whole of me in one pass. But something has been unloaded from him. He used to stand like a man carrying weight in the dark. He's standing on my doorstep like a man who has set something down.
I take the flowers from him and marvel at their beauty.
"You knocked," I say. Wit of the county, they call me. Renowned everywhere for it.
"I did."
"You don't knock. You've never knocked on anything in your life. You come out of the walls."
"I'm finished coming out of the walls." He says it simply, without flourish. "Doors now. This one specifically, if you'll let me."
I should say something. There's a traffic jam of things, twelve weeks of them, some of them furious, and every one of them is jockeying for the exit at once, so what happens instead is nothing. I stand in my own doorway and shake, very slightly, holding a square photograph and looking at him.
His eyes go to my hand.
I watch it happen. I watch this man, who I have seen take a bullet with less reaction than most people give a paper cut, look at a crumpled grey and white printout in my fist and stop breathing. His whole stillness changes quality.
"Liam told me," he says quietly. "When we met." His jaw works once. "Knowing is not the same as seeing."
"When you met—" I repeat, trailing off. My voice comes out somewhere between a whisper and an accusation. "You met with Liam."
"Three days ago. In tow—." A pause. "I asked him for something. He took his time answering. He was right to."
The pieces fall in on me all at once, Liam's Right, Liam's days of rewiring, Liam walking down the hallways just now slow as Sunday.
My eyes are burning before Yakob even reaches into his jacket.
What he takes out of the inside pocket is small and dark, and he doesn't kneel, he wouldn't know how.
This is a man who has never once done anything the ornamental way, he just opens the little box with his thumb and holds it out flat on his palm, level with the photograph in my fist, like an exchange.
The ring is old gold, a pale stone, simple.
"I had a speech," he says. "I've been working on it forever, it feels.
On planes and boats." His eyes have not left my face.
In all my life no one has looked at me the way this man looks at me.
Like looking is the whole occupation. "So here's what's left of it.
The work is done. All of it. There's no one on this earth left who would touch you, and I have nothing now.
No contracts, no name that opens doors, no walls to hide in or come out of.
I stood on a hill where my mother's kitchen used to be and I gave it back to her.
What's left is just a man, and the man can't do it.
" His voice drops, and roughens, and for the first time since Lipari I hear it cost him.
"I can't imagine a life without you in it, Iris.
I've tried. I had twelve weeks and three continents to try.
So if the work being done means anything, I'm hoping—" he stops, and starts again, "I'm hoping you can't imagine it either. "
The bean in the photograph. The irises crushed on one side. The doorway that finally isn't empty…
"I don't even know your last name," I whisper, idiotically, because it's the wound I've been carrying and it comes out backwards.
"Vetrov," he says. "Yakob Vetrov. It means wind." Something moves at the corner of his mouth, that almost-smile that completely disarms me. "You can have it. Or keep your own. I'm not asking to marry you because of a name."
And that's it. That's the whole of my composure, gone, spent, the last of it burned off in one breath. I'm crying, and I'm laughing, and the photograph is still in my hand where it belongs, and I do the only thing left in the world to do.
I fling myself at him.
His face comes down into my hair and I feel it, the shudder that goes through the whole quiet length of him, the sound he makes that isn't a word in any language. The scent of irises rising around us like something breaking open.
Behind me, from the depths of the hall, comes the unmistakable sound of my entire family not eavesdropping.