Epilogue
Arkady
Five years later.
The soccer ball rockets past my left ear and smacks into the rose bushes.
A shower of pink petals rains down, and somewhere behind me, Mirabel groans.
“Aleks! The roses!”
“Sorry, Mama!”
Aleks doesn’t look sorry. He grins with his whole face.
Nearly six years old and already impossible to contain.
He takes off running after the ball, arms pumping.
Sara chases him. She always chases him. Five years old and seven months younger than Aleks, but she keeps pace with typical determination.
My daughter, through and through—stubborn as a mule, clever as a fox, and completely incapable of letting anyone else win.
“Arty, nyet! Put that down—” I lunge for the garden hose Arty has managed to drag across the terrace. Too late. A jet of water hits Adrik square in the face. Adrik doesn’t cry. He blinks, opens his mouth, and screams—not out of pain, but indignation. Then he grabs his brother’s shirt and bites him.
“Blyad.” I scoop up one twin under each arm. They weigh nothing. They weigh everything. Two years old and already conspiring to destroy whatever room they occupy. I separate them on opposite ends of the outdoor sofa and point at each one in turn. “No biting. No hose. Sit.”
Arty gives me a look of such pure defiance that I almost laugh. Almost. That face is mine, the same vertical crease between the brows when something doesn’t go his way.
Adrik is already climbing off the sofa.
I put him back. “Sidite, oba. Sit. Both of you.”
They sit. For approximately nine seconds.
Mirabel appears beside me, coffee in hand, Sara’s juice box in the other.
Her hair is pulled up in a loose knot, chestnut strands escaping in every direction, the caramel streaks catching afternoon light.
She wears a green linen dress—always beautiful in green, my zaychik—and there’s a smear of yogurt on her collarbone that she hasn’t noticed.
I want to lick it off.
Five years married, four children, and this woman still undoes me with a yogurt stain.
“Your sons are feral animals,” she says, watching Arty scale the arm of the sofa again.
“When they misbehave, they’re my sons. When they sleep, they’re yours.”
“Because I’m the one who gets them to sleep.”
“Exactly. Credit where it’s due.”
She bumps her hip against mine, and I hook an arm around her waist, pulling her closer. The warmth of her body settles something in my chest.
A shriek from the far end of the lawn pulls our attention. Debra’s oldest, Mila, has commandeered the soccer ball and is refusing to give it back. Aleks tries diplomacy first—impressive, for his age—but Mila doesn’t negotiate.
Yanis rounds the corner of the house, his three-year-old son Mika riding his shoulders like a small emperor surveying his kingdom.
My brother looks relaxed in a way he didn’t used to.
Softer around the edges. He sets Mika down, and the boy rockets toward the other children without a backward glance.
“I heard screaming,” Yanis says.
“Arty bit Adrik.”
“Again?”
“Da.”
“He gets that from you.” Yanis settles into the chair beside me.
His youngest, baby Lena, sleeps against Debra’s shoulder as Debra walks toward us across the lawn, her steps slow and easy.
She wears lavender today, and she moves through open space with a confidence that took years to rebuild.
Mirabel watches her twin cross the grass, and something passes between them—that silent language they share.
Debra sits beside Mirabel. Lena stirs, makes a small sound, and settles again.
The two sisters lean into each other, shoulders touching, and for a moment, they are mirror images.
The same… but different. Debra still carries her history in moments she thinks no one is looking.
Yanis watches for those moments. He always watches. Not hovering but present. Ready.
They’re good together. The kind of good that doesn’t make noise.
“Papa! Papa, watch!” Sara calls from the top of the garden wall beside me. She stands with her arms out, wobbling. My entire body tenses.
“I see you, malyshka,” I say, keeping my voice even. “Jump. I’ll catch you.”
She launches. I’m already there, arms out, and she lands against my chest with a thump that knocks the air out of me.
She smells like grass and strawberry ice cream and the lavender soap Mirabel uses for their baths.
She wraps her arms around my neck and squeezes, her small fingers pressing into my skin.
“Good catch, Papa.”
“Always.”
I set her down, and she’s gone, racing toward Aleks and the disputed soccer ball.
I watch her go.
There was a time when I would rather have cut off my own hand than hold a child.
The thought of it—a small body depending on me, trusting me, existing because of me—would shut me down so completely that the world narrowed to a pinhole.
No children. That was the rule. Children meant something to lose. Something to destroy.
And then a registrar with a torn dress and no survival instincts walked into my life and dismantled every wall I’d built.
God knows I fought it. Fought her. Fought the pregnancy, the pull of it, the terrifying softness that crept in when she fell asleep against me. Fought Aleks—this baby who possibly wasn’t mine, who showed up at the worst possible moment, screaming and red-faced and motherless.
But I held him. When everyone was gone, and this tiny creature had no one, I held him. And something cracked open inside me.
Aleks didn’t fix me. Mirabel didn’t fix me. I’m not sure I’m fixed. But I’m here, and I’m present, and when my sons bite each other, I don’t think about how I might ruin them. I think about how to teach them to be better men than the one my father raised.
Most days, that’s enough.
“Arkady.” Mirabel’s voice pulls me back. She stands at the edge of the terrace, coffee cooling in her hands, watching me. Those brown eyes—deep and warm and too clever by half—read me the way she always has. She sees the shift, knows where my mind has gone.
She doesn’t crowd me. She never does. She just stands there, steady and solid and completely, infuriatingly herself, and waits for me to come back.
I cross the terrace and take the coffee from her hand. Set it on the stone railing. Then I cup her face, tilting it up, and press my lips to her forehead. She closes her eyes.
“I’m here,” I tell her.
“I know. Are you okay?”
“Around you… always.”
She smiles, her hand coming up to cover mine against her cheek. “Good.” She turns her face and kisses my palm. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t probe. Although she knows where my thoughts are. She always does.
The urn is still in the room at the end of the east wing.
I go in once a week, sometimes more. But it’s different now.
I don’t lock the door behind me. Sometimes Sara follows me in and sits on the sofa, legs swinging, asking questions about Uncle Mishka.
I answer them honestly. I tell her he was clever and kind.
I tell her he liked to draw ships. I tell her I miss him every day.
I don’t tell her how he died. One day I will. Perhaps.
“Uncle Mishka would have loved this,” Sara told me once, looking out at the garden through the studio window. She was four. She’d never met him, never seen his face outside of photographs, and still she spoke about him as if he existed nearby, watching.
I couldn’t speak for a full minute after that.
A crash from inside the house jolts me. Mirabel and I exchange a look.
“Yours,” she says instantly.
“Ours,” I correct, already moving. I find Arty in the kitchen, standing in a sea of pots and pans he’s pulled from the bottom cupboard. He looks up at me with absolute pride.
“Papa. I cook.”
“You cook,” I repeat, staring at the devastation. A saucepan rolls slowly toward my foot. “What are you cooking?”
“Cake.”
“With pans?”
“Da.”
I pick him up, settling him on my hip. He grabs my ear. I let him. The boy is obsessed with ears—mine, Mirabel’s, Adrik’s. We’ve stopped questioning it.
Adrik toddles in from the terrace, spots his twin elevated to the coveted hip position, and begins to wail.
I pick him up, too. One on each side. Matching boys with matching lungs, dark hair, and my mouth.
Mirabel’s nose. My mother’s eyes—gray-green and watchful—which gutted me the first time I noticed.
I carry them both back outside, where the evening is settling over Ashwater Heights.
The garden sprawls below the terrace, the children scattered across it.
Yanis is teaching Mika to kick the soccer ball properly.
Mila sits cross-legged in the grass, picking daisies with disturbing intensity.
Debra sways gently with Lena, singing something low and Russian that Yanis must have taught her—our mother’s lullaby, the one she used to sing before the world broke.
I hear the melody, and something catches in my chest. Not pain, exactly. Not anymore. Just the ache of absence sitting next to the fullness of what I have.
Aleks runs up the terrace steps, sweating, grass-stained, grinning. “Papa, can we have pizza tonight?”
“Ask your mother.”
“She said ask you.”
I narrow my eyes. “Did she?”
He nods, his expression pure innocence. The kid is lying. He hasn’t asked Mirabel. He came straight to me because he knows I’m easier. Smart. Devious. Definitely mine.
“Pizza,” I concede. “But you eat salad first.”
“Deal!” He’s gone before I can attach conditions, shouting the news to Sara and Mila. A small riot of celebration erupts on the lawn.
Mirabel appears at my elbow, Sara’s juice box now empty, a knowing look on her face. “He didn’t ask me, did he?”
“Nyet.”
“And you caved.”
“Immediately.”
She laughs—full and bright and reckless—and the sound rolls through me the way it always does.
“Ty moya zhizn’,” I tell her quietly. You are my life. I say it in Russian because some things sit better in the language I grew up bleeding in. English is for business, for precision. Russian is for truth.
She rises on her toes and kisses me. Not long, not urgent—just firm and warm, her hand resting on my chest where she can feel my pulse.
“I know,” she whispers against my lips. “You’re mine too.”
Later, after pizza and bath time, I stand in the hallway outside the children’s rooms. The house is settling into the thick, lived-in quiet of a home that’s been thoroughly exhausted by small humans.
I check on them. Every night. Aleks sleeps on his stomach, one arm hanging off the bed, mouth open.
Sara curls into a tight ball, blankets pulled to her chin, a stuffed rabbit crushed against her chest. The twins sleep tangled together in the same crib they’ve refused to outgrow, Arty’s hand wrapped around Adrik’s wrist as if making sure his brother can’t escape.
I stand there longer than I need to.
Down the hall, I hear Yanis’s low voice through a closed door, reading to Mika. Debra’s quiet laughter drifts out.
We all live here. Under one roof. The mansion that once felt like a mausoleum now overflows with noise and mess and the constant, blessed chaos of seven children, four adults, and a staffing situation that I don’t try to understand.
Mirabel is in our bed when I walk in, reading something on her tablet. She looks up. Smiles.
I close the door.
“Everyone down?”
“Out cold. Arty’s holding Adrik hostage again.”
She sets the tablet aside and pulls the covers back. An invitation. A demand. Both, knowing my wife.
I strip down, slide in beside her, and pull her against me. She fits. She always fits—her back against my chest, her feet tangled with mine.
“Arkady?”
“Mm.”
“You were quiet tonight. After dinner.” Her fingers trace patterns on my forearm. Not probing. Just making space for me to talk if I want to.
“Mishka,” I say. It’s all I need to say.
She threads her fingers through mine and brings my hand to her lips.
I close my eyes. In the darkness behind them, I see my brother. Not bleeding on a cold floor. I see him the way I want to remember him. Twelve years old, drawing ships at the kitchen table, tongue poking out between his teeth as he concentrates.
He should be here. A young man now, mid-twenties, maybe taller than me. He’d spoil the kids rotten. Aleks would worship him. Sara would boss him around. The twins would climb him like a tree.
He isn’t here. And I will miss him every day of my life. That’s not a wound anymore. It’s a scar—healed over, permanent, part of me. I carry it the way I carry everything I love. Close, and carefully, and without apology.
Because family is everything.
My zaychik sighs in my arms. Her breathing deepens, evening out into sleep. I listen to it the way I used to listen for threats, with total attention, my whole body tuned to the sound.
But this is not a threat.
This is my life. Loud, messy, terrifying, wonderful… ours.
I keep my eyes closed and let it soak into me.
THE END