Epilogue
Iris
My husband doesn't dance, but he does sway.
I learned this an hour ago, in the garden, under strings of lights my brothers spent two days hanging and one day arguing about, and I intend to spend the rest of my life exploiting the discovery.
He holds me the way he holds anything that matters, close and completely, and he moves just enough that no one can accuse him of standing still.
The whole time his mouth stays an inch from my ear like there's a broadcast only I'm cleared to receive.
"You're staring at me," I told him, somewhere in the middle of the third song.
"Yes," he said, unbothered, and kept doing it.
That's the thing nobody warns you about, marrying a man who spent twenty years being nobody. When he finally decides to be somebody, he does it the way he does everything else. Thoroughly. With total commitment. Zero regard for how much it undoes you in front of a hundred guests.
The wedding was everything I didn't dare sketch in the back of my mind during the bad weeks.
Ma cried before I even came down the stairs.
My brothers lined the aisle in a row, all five of them, and I watched Yakob walk that gauntlet on his way to the front.
Every one of them shook his hand. Liam last. Liam longest. Whatever passed between them in that grip, neither of them will ever tell me, and for once in my life I don't need to know.
I made my own dress. Empire waist, because the smallest guest at this wedding is five months along and starting to announce herself, a soft curve under ivory and pink silk that Yakob's eyes kept dropping to all through the vows like a compass finding north.
His vows were twelve words long.
"You saw me. No one saw me. I'm yours. All of it."
Grammatically a disaster. The garden went so quiet you could hear the lights hum.
Tanya sobbed audibly whilst clutching baby Rowan to her chest. Rafferty, who once asked whether there was anyone he needed to find, blew his nose with a sound like a ferry leaving harbor, and I stood there in front of everyone I love and thought, this is what it was all for.
The van, the stone room with iron bars, the escape and the small dilapidated farm house on Lipari.
The six worst weeks of my life that followed. The six after that.
Every road, even the ones that go through the dark, was only ever coming here.
Now it's late. The garden has thinned to the diehards.
Aidan is teaching one of the Bratva contingent an Irish drinking song, phonetically, with tragic results.
Ma is asleep in a chair with Mila sprawled and asleep on top of her, both of them lit gold by the last of the lanterns, and Grace is photographing it for leverage.
The kitchen behind them is a battlefield of food and plates that everyone has collectively agreed to ignore until morning, which is a first in the history of this house.
And I'm standing in the doorway, the same doorway, watching my family run down like a music box, and I feel the exact moment my husband comes to stand behind me.
He doesn't make a sound. He never makes a sound.
But the air changes shape, and then his hands settle on my shoulders, and his thumb finds the bare nape of my neck and presses gently.
"Wife," he says. Testing it. He's been doing this all evening, deploying the word at intervals, like a man checking a new weight in his hand.
"Husband." I lean back into him. "You know what I've just realized?"
"Tell me."
"Less than six months ago I sat on that sofa, upside down, swiping through the entire failed male population of the whole of the states.
" I tip my head back against his chest to look up at him, and there it is, the almost-smile, the one that lives at the corner of his mouth and belongs to me now, legally, with paperwork and everything.
"And the whole time, the actual love of my life was climbing through windows for a living. "
I find his hand where it rests on my shoulder and lace my fingers through it and bring it down, slowly, over the silk, over the curve of our not so little bean, who has been to a wedding now and behaved beautifully. "Yakob."
"Mm."
"Take me to bed."
I feel what the words do to him. He turns me around in the doorway, unhurried, and looks at me the way he looked at me on a beach on Lipari, like nothing else matters but me.
"The party," he says, but it's not an objection. It's a formality. He's giving me the exit I'm never going to take.
"Is over. Aidan is singing. That's the fire alarm of Orlov parties." I take his hand.
We don't make it up the stairs gracefully.
We make it up the stairs like two people who have been polite in public for eleven hours.
His mouth finds mine on the landing, my laugh muffled against his stubbled jaw, his hands careful and everywhere at once.
Somewhere below us Aidan hits a note that has no business existing and neither of us cares, because the door of my room, our room, closes behind us with a click that shuts the whole world out.
And then he slows down.
That's the thing about Yakob that I could never have explained to the woman on the sofa.
The most dangerous man in the world, the one they sent when everything else failed, makes love like there's no such thing as time.
He unpins my hair first. Taking them out one at a time and setting them on the dresser in a neat soldier's row while the whole construction Katya spent an hour on comes down around my shoulders, and he watches it fall with an expression that should honestly be illegal.
"Twelve words," I whisper, working the knot of his tie loose. "You stood in front of my entire family and my mother and you gave me twelve words."
"They were the right ones."
"They were." My eyes are stinging again for the third time today. "They were exactly the right ones."
The dress I made has forty covered buttons down the back, which seemed romantic at the sewing machine and now seems like an act of self-sabotage, except that Yakob undoes them one at a time, pressing his mouth to each new inch of my spine as it's surrendered.
I'm shaking and the silk slides off me into a pale pool on the floorboards and I stand in the lamplight and let him look.
He looks for a long time.
His hands come to rest at last on the curve of my belly, both of them spread wide.
This man who once told me his hands had only ever been tools, and he goes down, not kneeling, he wouldn't know how, but folding, until his forehead rests against the swell of his child and his arms wrap around my hips and he holds on.
I stand there with my fingers in his hair and feel the shudder move through him, the one that has no sound, and I hold my whole family in my arms.
"Ya lyublyu tebya," he says, against my skin. He says it in Russian first, always, like the words need a running start. Then, rougher, lifting his face to me: "I love you, Iris Vetrova."
I’ll keep my own name everywhere else, but use his for this room only. That's our arrangement, and it makes him say it exactly like that, every time, like he can't believe it’s real.
"I love you too." I draw him up by the lapels he's still wearing, walk him backward to our bed, and push, and he lets himself fall the way he never lets himself fall for anyone else, and I follow him down into the lamplight. "Now hold still, husband. I have some staring of my own to do."
I take my time with the buttons of his shirt.
I know every scar underneath by heart now, I've traced the whole of him, the pale seam at his ribs from Palermo, the old burn along his forearm from a winter he's only told me about once, and I kiss each one as it appears the way he kissed my spine, a debt repaid with interest, and I feel him unmake himself under my hands, breath by breath, the way he only ever does here, for me.
After that there are no more jokes for a while.
There's lamplight, and the slow familiar gravity of him, and my name in his mouth like the first word he ever learned.
There's the reverent, maddening care he takes with me now; one hand always braced like I'm made of something rare, until I inform him, breathless, that I'm made of Orlova stock and he can act accordingly, and the sound he makes then is almost a laugh.
After that it's the two of us the way we were on the island, hungry and certain and shameless, except better, because the door we're behind now is ours, and nobody is coming, nothing is chasing us, and every road out of this bed leads back into it.
When it's over, when we're a tangle in the wrecked sheets and my heart is doing its slow return descent, he arranges us the way he always does, my back to his chest, his arm my pillow, his hand settled low over the curve where our future is sleeping through the whole scandal.
The window is open an inch. Far below, the garden has gone finally, blessedly quiet, except for one voice.
"Is that---?" Yakob says, into my hair.
"Aidan. Yes. Verse nine."
"There are more verses?"
"There are always more verses. Welcome to the family." I feel his smile against the back of my neck, an actual smile, the full one, the one maybe five living people have ever seen, and I pull his arm tighter around us both like a seatbelt. "Regretting anything yet, Ghost?"
He's quiet for a moment. The lamp hums. Somewhere in the walls, this old house settles the way it always settles, and the man who used to come out of walls holds his whole world in his two hands and breathes like he's finally learned how.
"Not a single one," he says, at last, into my hair.
I fall asleep in the middle of a smile, in the middle of my own bed, in the middle of my own life, with the Bratva Ghost wrapped around me like a promise he already kept.