38. Luka #2
"I don't have a speech," I said. "You've had all my words. I have one question and it is the only one that has ever mattered. Marry me. Build the reckless thing with me. Let me be the man who is standing in the open with you when whatever comes, comes."
"You don't have a ring," she said, wet and laughing, "do you? You planned a whole proposal and you don't have a ring."
"I did not plan this. You poisoned the timeline."
As it happened, I did have a ring, though I had not earned the credit for it.
Yelena had pressed it into my hand a week earlier without a word of explanation, an old thing, gold gone soft at the edges, a small stone that had belonged to Nikolai's mother and her mother before that, the ring the Volkov women had handed down through a century of men who did dangerous work and came home anyway.
Yelena had simply decided, the way she decides everything, that I would be needing it.
I had been carrying it around like a coward, waiting for a perfect moment that I now understood was never going to be more perfect than an ordinary night on the floor with my knee screaming and my hood down and my whole self turned up toward the only thing I have ever been afraid to look straight at.
I held it out. It shook. I let it.
"Okay," Harper said, and then, "yes, obviously, oh my God, yes," and she got the ring onto her own finger because my hands were useless, and then she was in my lap and I had both arms around the two of them, and I held on the way I should have been allowed to hold on a long time ago.
We might have stayed there an hour. We did not get the chance, because Dani had been in the hallway.
"I KNEW it," Dani said, at a volume that suggested she had been holding it in physically with both hands. "I knew when you turned green at the fish. I said it. I said to Kade, that's not a fish thing, that's a person thing, and he said don't be weird, and now look. LOOK."
"How long have you been standing there?" Harper said into my neck.
"Long enough to be emotionally compensated for it. I'm the baby's aunt. That's decided. That's not up for a vote." She was already on her phone. "I'm doing a theme. Don't fight me. There will be a theme."
"There will not be a theme," Harper said.
"There's a theme," Dani said, walking out, already calling someone, already wrong about something.
What followed I could not have planned and could not have stopped, a slow avalanche of a household who had decided the matter was theirs as much as ours.
Grig arrived first, which made sense, since Grig is never more than one wall away from Harper at any hour.
He filled the doorway the way he fills doorways, an enormous quiet mountain of a man, and he took one look at Harper's hand and her wet cheeks and mine, and his jaw set hard, and his eyes went bright in a way he would deny under torture.
"Malyshka," he said, and his voice cracked straight down the middle on the second syllable, and he turned it instantly into a cough, and glared at the wall as though the wall had done it. "There is dust in this room."
"There's no dust, Grig," Harper said gently.
"There is dust," Grig informed her, with the conviction of a man defending the last shred of his dignity, and then he crossed in three strides and put one enormous hand on the top of my head like a benediction and the other, very carefully, the way you would cup a bird, against the side of Harper's cheek, and said nothing at all, because there was nothing in any of his languages big enough.
Yelena came in behind him already carrying food, because Yelena has never once in her life entered a room of high emotion without something to feed it.
She set a plate down, looked at the ring on Harper's hand, recognized it instantly, of course she did, she had put it in my palm, and she pressed both her own hands to her mouth.
"You wore the hood off," she said to me, which I had not expected her to clock and should have, because she misses nothing either, it is where I learned it. "Good. Good boy. About time you let us look at you."
"Yelena," I started.
"Eat," she said, which is how Yelena says everything she cannot say, and then she gathered Harper into her like Harper was something she had been waiting twenty-two years to gather, and Harper, who was raised by no one, who learned the word kin the way you learn a foreign noun, made a small wrecked sound into the matriarch's shoulder and let herself be held.
Kade ambled in last, hands in his pockets, because Kade has never hurried toward anything but his own opinions. "So I'm hearing there's a baby," he said. "And I'm hearing nobody asked my permission, which, frankly, after everything I did in the war."
"You got shot once," I said. "By accident. By your own gun."
"A war wound," Kade said, "is a war wound," and then he grinned at me, the real one, the rare one, and said, quieter, "Congratulations, you miserable shadow.
Genuinely. The kid's going to be unbearable and I cannot wait," which, from a boy who communicates almost exclusively in insults, was the warmest thing he owned.
Nikolai came in without a sound, the way he always does, and the room rearranged itself around him out of pure habit, the way a room does around a Pakhan, everyone half a degree more upright.
He looked at me a long moment. The man took me in off a sidewalk when I was a boy with nothing in me but a kitchen floor and a vow to feel nothing ever again.
He gave me a roof and a trade and an entire household I spent most of my life refusing to fully belong to, because belonging meant having something to lose, and I had decided very young never to have that again.
He crossed to me and put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled my forehead to his.
"My father took you in," he said, low, just for me.
"I always thought we were keeping you safe.
I understand now we were only keeping you.
Waiting for you to decide to live." His thumb pressed once, hard, against the old scar fading on my forearm.
"You decided. He would have wept. I may, in private, where there are no witnesses and no dust."
"There is, apparently, a great deal of dust today," I said, and the old man laughed, a real one, gravel and warmth, a sound I had heard perhaps four times in my life, and the whole room went loose and loud around it.
Then there was noise, the good kind, the kind that had been missing from my entire existence and that I had told myself I did not need.
Dani came back with a theme nobody approved, and Yelena produced more food than physics allowed.
Grig stationed himself by Harper and refused to be moved and pretended the wet on his cheeks was the room's fault.
Kade argued with Nikolai about whether he counted as godfather and lost with great dignity.
Harper sat in the middle of all of it with the ring catching the light and her palm resting flat on her own belly, on the reckless impossible future I had agreed, out loud, to be afraid of forever and to choose anyway, every single day.
At some point she caught my eye across the noise. She did the thing she does, the small private one, mouthing my name, the one only she calls me, the name from when I was nothing but a voice behind glass.
And I crossed the room. I had spent my whole life on the other side of a screen, hooded, hidden, half a man on purpose, certain it was the only kindness I could offer anyone I loved. I had been wrong about that for twenty-six years, and I had exactly one way to say so that would mean anything.
On one knee in my hoodie, no screen left between us, I asked her to marry me. "Took you long enough," she said, crying and laughing, "to show your face." Yes.