14. Konstantin
Konstantin
Eight Months Later...
Ihave sent men to their deaths with a steadier hand than the one Hazel is currently crushing in hers.
It is, by some distance, the worst night of my life, and I would not trade a second of it. A private room at the top of the best hospital in the country, every specialist money and a crown can summon standing by.
But none of it, none of it, matters, because for the first time since I was twelve years old I am in a room where I do not get to decide what happens.
I cannot order this to go faster. I cannot threaten the pain into leaving her.
I, who can close a border with a phone call, can do precisely one thing of use tonight, and it is to let my wife break the bones in my hand and tell her, over and over, that she is the strongest person I have ever known.
"You're doing so well," I say, for the hundredth time, my mouth at her sweat-damp temple. "Moya dusha. Almost. I have you."
"You're terrified," she pants, half a laugh in it even now, even here. "Scared of a baby."
"Petrified," I admit, because I have learned to give her the truth, and because it makes her laugh, and her laughing is the only thing keeping me upright.
And then, after hours that age me a decade, there is a sound in the room that was not there before. Thin and furious and absolutely outraged to have been disturbed.
A girl. A daughter. Red and squalling and perfect, lifted up into the lamplight, and I simply stop functioning, undone on the spot, while they settle her on Hazel's chest and my wife sobs and laughs and says, “Hi, hi, there you are, I've got you, I've got you.”
I have to sit down. I, who have stood through executions, have to sit down.
"She's perfect," I manage, when I can speak. "You're perfect. You — both of you—"
"Do you want to know her name?" Hazel says.
We never settled it. We argued over it for months, gently, going in circles, nothing fitting.
I assumed we'd decide in the room. I assumed wrong, because my wife — my brave, impossible, bottomless-hearted wife — looks up at me with our daughter on her chest and says, very quietly, like she's been holding it close and afraid:
"I want to call her Tatiana."
The room goes very still.
"Hazel—" My voice doesn't work.
"She gave Lena and Misha to the world," she says, steady, certain, her eyes wet and unflinching on mine.
"She gave them you. I'm not afraid, Konstantin.
I don't want her erased from this family — I want her in it.
I want our daughter to carry the name of the woman who was brave enough to die so two of my children could live.
" Her chin lifts, that flicker of steel I fell for across a study a lifetime ago.
"Unless it hurts you. Then we don't. But I think — I think it might be the opposite of hurting. "
Three years ago a woman died for me and I could not love her, and I have carried that like a stone in my chest every day since.
My wife has just reached in and turned the stone into something I can finally set down.
"Tatiana," I say, and my voice breaks on it, clean in half, and I press my forehead to Hazel's and let her feel me come apart, because she is the only person alive I will ever allow to see it. "Yes. Tatiana. Thank you. God, Hazel — thank you."
***
They bring the children in shortly after.
Misha barrels in first, four years old and indignant about having slept through the entire event, and clambers up to inspect his sister with the deep suspicion of a boy who suspects he is being replaced, until she grips his offered finger and his whole face changes and he announces, to the room, that she is pretty and he will be teaching her everything.
Lena comes in slowly.
She has been the careful one from the beginning — my daughter who remembers, who guards, who learned too young that the people who choose you can leave.
She edges to the side of the bed and looks at the small bundle in Hazel's arms with an expression I know intimately, because it is my own: the look of someone deciding whether it is safe to want a thing this much.
"This is your sister," Hazel says softly. "Do you want to meet her?"
Lena nods, mute.
"Her name is Tatiana."
Her head comes up. "That's — that was my mama's name."
"I know." Hazel's voice doesn't waver, though I can see what it costs her. "I picked it on purpose. So your mama's always part of our family. So nobody ever forgets her. Is that okay?"
I watch my older daughter understand, all at once, the thing it has taken her seven careful years and one extraordinary woman to learn: that being loved by someone new is not a betrayal of someone lost. That there is room. That hands reaching down to choose you are not always, in the end, a lie.
Lena looks at the baby. She looks at Hazel — who named a child after a ghost rather than let that ghost be forgotten, who came back across an ocean she was already on, who has never once, not for a single day, made my daughter compete for a place she was always going to have.
Lena's face crumples.
"Mama," she says to Hazel, and climbs straight up onto the bed and into her arms, careful of the baby, fierce around everything else, and buries her face in Hazel's neck. "Mama."
I have to turn and look very hard out the window at the snow so my children don't see their father weep.
It's snowing. It always is, here. But for the life of me, standing in a warm room with my wife and three children and a name I'd buried come back as a beginning, I cannot find the cold in it anywhere.
Later the room is dim, Misha asleep in a chair too big for him, Lena curled at the foot of the bed refusing to leave, Tatiana a warm weight against my chest no bigger than a loaf of bread and Hazel watching me hold our daughter with a look I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.
"You realize," she murmurs, "we're going to need help. Three of them now."
"No nanny."
She blinks at me. "Konstantin. Three children. One of them brand new."
"No nanny." I look down at the impossibly small face on my chest, then back at her.
"I began this whole life with a stranger hired out of a file to raise my children — because I'd decided I was too important and too frozen to do it myself.
A woman my mother chose, sight unseen, to stand in the place a parent is supposed to stand.
" My throat works. "I am never putting a hired stranger in that place again.
Not now that I finally understand what it's worth. "
"You want to raise them the old-fashioned way," she says slowly. "Ourselves."
"As much as two people in this ridiculous gilded house can manage anything the old-fashioned way — yes.
" The corner of my mouth lifts. "There'll be a cook, because between us we'd burn the palace down.
There'll be tutors, and Grigor will require medical leave over the security of letting three royal children do anything as reckless as a normal childhood.
But the bedtimes are ours. The scraped knees.
The bad dreams. The favorite colors." I hold her eyes. "Especially the favorite colors."
She sniffles, blinking away tears.
"There's no nanny to hire," I tell her, quietly.
"There never was, really. You were never the help, Hazel.
You were theirs from the afternoon Misha climbed into your lap and Lena decided to risk her favorite color.
We just took a while to call the thing by its right name.
" I tip my head at the three children breathing in the dim room.
"Mama. That's the only position open in this family, and it's filled. "
Hazel laughs and reaches over to lay her hand on our daughter's back, beside mine.
"You were so sure," she says softly. "That first night. That you weren't built for this."
"I wasn't." I catch her hand, lace our fingers over the rise and fall of Tatiana's breathing. "You built it. You walked into my house and built the whole thing while I was still insisting it couldn't exist."
"I was so sure too," she says. "That I was only ever passing through.”
"And now?"
She looks around the dim warm room at the sleeping boy, the fierce girl, the new daughter, the husband who would still, tonight, burn the country to the waterline for any one of them.
"Now I'm home," she says.
"Now you're home," I agree, and it is the truest sentence I have ever spoken, and outside the snow comes down patient and endless over a palace that is no longer, has not been for a long time now, anything at all like cold.
***