Epilogue
Tanya
Two months ago, I married a man I told myself I didn't want.
I was wrong about a lot of things back then.
I was wrong about what want looks like when you've spent your whole life being told that wanting is weakness.
I was wrong about what safety feels like when you've only ever known the kind that comes with conditions.
And I was wrong about Aidan Orlov, in every way that matters, except one.
I was right that he would change everything.
The morning is cool and bright and I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror, and my hands are shaking.
Not the way they used to shake. Not the controlled tremor of a woman holding herself together through sheer force of will.
This is different. This is nervous energy.
Excitement. The kind of shaking that happens when you're about to do something you've wanted for years and you can't quite believe it's real.
My first day of school.
I study my reflection and I barely recognize the woman looking back at me.
I've not changed physically, although Saoirse insists I look healthier, which is her polite way of saying I was too thin before and she's spent two months feeding me into what she considers an acceptable state.
It's something behind the eyes. Something that wasn't there before.
I look like someone who's allowed to want things.
I'm wearing jeans and a cream knit sweater with flat boots, and my hair is down because Iris told me that wearing it up on the first day makes you look like you're trying too hard.
Iris has never been to college, never wanted to, but she has opinions about everything and delivers them with such conviction that you find yourself obeying before you realize what happened.
My bag is by the front door. Inside it: a notebook, three pens, a laptop that Aidan bought me without being asked and left on the kitchen counter two weeks ago.
It's been a process. Two months doesn't undo twenty-four years of ice and armor, and there are still days when the ice comes back without warning.
Days when someone says something, or a silence lasts a beat too long, and my body defaults to the old programming.
Aidan can tell when it happens. He doesn't push.
He just stays close and waits, and sooner or later, I come back to him, and each time it's a little faster than the last.
My father called once. Three weeks after the wedding. I stared at his name on my phone for a long time, standing in Saoirse's kitchen with a cup of tea going cold in my hands, and then I declined the call and blocked the number.
He tried to reach me through Liam after that. A formal message. Something about family obligations and maintaining the relationship between the Savitsky’s and the Orlovs. Liam showed it to Aidan, and Aidan showed it to me, because that's what we do now. Honesty, even when it's ugly.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
"Nothing," I said. "He's nothing to me now."
Aidan nodded, the message went unanswered, and my father's name hasn't come up since.
But my mother's has.
She wrote to me. An actual letter, handwritten, forwarded through three different addresses before it reached the Orlov estate.
I found it in the pile of mail that Saoirse brings in every afternoon, and I recognized the handwriting before I read the return address.
I sat on the bed and held it in both hands for twenty minutes before I opened it.
She didn't apologize. My mother has never been the apologizing kind.
But she told me she was glad I was out. That she'd heard I'd married well, and that she hoped well meant something different with the Orlovs than it did with the Savitsky’s.
She asked me if I was happy, and the way she wrote it, with the question mark pressed so hard into the paper that I could feel the indent on the other side, told me she needed the answer to be yes.
I didn't write back immediately. I took the letter to Saoirse.
I don't know when that became a thing I do.
Taking the hard parts to Aidan's mother and sitting at her kitchen table while she makes tea and listens.
But it happened gradually, the way everything in this family happens.
Not with force. With presence. Saoirse doesn't tell me what to do.
She doesn't judge. She asks questions that make me think, and she touches my hand when the thinking gets heavy, and she has a way of saying you'll know when you're ready that sounds like permission instead of a platitude.
"She left you," Saoirse said, reading the letter.
I’d only just managed to nod. Not trusting my voice to carry the words.
"And you're angry about that."
Another nod. Shorter, sharper.
Saoirse set the letter down and looked at me over her tea. "You know, leaving isn't always cowardice. Sometimes it's the only option a woman has when every other door is locked." A pause. "That doesn't make it hurt less. But it might make it easier to write back."
I wrote back that night. A short letter. I told her I was starting school. I told her I was married to a man who lets me choose. I told her I was beginning to understand why she left, even if I wasn't ready to forgive her for not taking me with her.
She hasn't replied yet. But the door is open. And open doors are something I'm learning to live with.
I take one last look in the mirror. Smooth my hands down the front of my sweater, and when I catch myself doing it, I stop. I don't need to brace anymore. Especially not today.
The kitchen smells like coffee. Aidan is leaning against the counter with a mug in his hand, and when I walk in, he looks at me the way he always does. Like he still can't quite believe is real.
His knuckles have healed. Faint scars across the right hand that he'll carry permanently, and every time I see them, I think about the night he came home covered in someone else's blood because a man said my name like it was worth less than dirt.
Apparently at the council meeting, Aidan stood in front of the full assembly and invoked the old code, and Gregor Malekonosh sat there and turned the color of ash.
By the end of it, a formal censure had been issued and Malekonosh had been stripped of his senior position.
Then Aidan took his pound of flesh from Malenkosh and Linchenko.
Aidan didn't gloat.
That's the kind of man he is. Violence when it's necessary. Quiet when it's over.
"You ready?" he asks.
"I think so."
He sets his mug down and crosses to me. His hands settle on my waist and I lean into him automatically, my forehead against his chest, and I breathe him in. Coffee. Clean cotton. The faint scent of whatever soap he uses. The smell of home.
"You're going to be incredible," he says into my hair.
"You don't know that."
"I do. I've known it since the night you walked up to me at a bar in Prague and I realized you were the smartest person I'd ever met."
I pull back and look up at him. "I was manipulating you."
"You were brilliant at it. Imagine what you'll do when you're actually trying to help people instead."
A laugh escapes me. Real and warm and still slightly unfamiliar in its ease. "That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"I'll work on that."
He kisses me. Slow and certain, the way he does everything. His hand cups the back of my neck and his thumb traces the line of my jaw, and when he pulls away, his eyes are steady and sure and full of something that I've stopped being afraid to call love.
I'm not quite ready to say the word out loud yet.
But I will be. It's somewhere in the space between us, growing in the same patient, inevitable way that everything between Aidan and me has grown.
From a night in Prague to a name on a contract to a kitchen full of brochures to this.
Standing in our home, about to walk out the door and into a life I chose.
"I should go," I say. "I don't want to be late."
"I'll drive you."
"Aidan, it's thirty minutes away. I can drive myself."
"I know you can. I want to drive you."
I look at him. This quiet, steady, infuriating man who waited years for me, and who is now asking to drive me to my first day of college like it's the most important thing he'll do today.
"Fine," I say.
He smiles. A real one. The kind he saves for moments when no one else is watching and it's just the two of us, and every time I see it, I think about how many years he kept it locked away. Waiting on a promise he made to himself the morning he woke up without me.
We walk out together. The morning light catches the stone walls and turns them gold, and the hedgerows are in bloom now, honeysuckle thick and sweet along the path.
The main house is visible through the trees, and I can see the kitchen light on, and I know Saoirse is in there making tea and listening to the radio.
Later today, when I come home, she'll want to hear about every single thing that happened.
Aidan opens the car door for me and I get in.
He climbs in beside me and starts the engine, and as we pull down the oak-lined drive and onto the main road, I watch the estate disappear in the side mirror. Not the way I watched my father's house disappear on my wedding day, with relief and finality and exhaustion.
This time, I watch it disappear knowing I'll come back. Knowing there's a table with a chair that's mine, and a kitchen that smells like someone else's love, and a bed where a man who sees me will be waiting when the day is done.
I turn to face the road ahead.