Chapter 28
CHLOE
Lily's sitting room caught the best of the late autumn light.
It came in low through the tall windows and laid itself across the rug in long honey panels.
Somewhere across the hall in the kitchen, something simmered that filled the apartment with the smell of toasted spice and slow heat.
Three wine glasses stood in a neat row on the side table.
Lily held the bottle like it had personally offended her.
"Hold this," she said, shoving the corkscrew at me. "If I yank this thing and it sprays on the silk, I will not survive the conversation I have to have with myself."
"Pakhan's wife, afraid of a cork." Sienna was already on the loveseat with her shoes off and her legs tucked under her, scrolling something on her phone with the calm of a woman who had decided the workday was over and dared anyone to dispute it. "Embarrassing."
"You uncork it then, counselor."
"I am a guest."
"You are family."
"Family adjacent." Sienna looked up and smiled at me, slow and warm. "Hi, Chloe."
"Hi."
"How's your grandma?"
I felt the soft click in my chest that question always made now. "She's home. She's good. She made me promise to come for dinner once a week or she would, and I quote, fly back here and drag me by the ear."
"That tracks."
"It absolutely tracks."
Lily got the cork out without spraying anything, gave it a satisfied look, and poured. "To grandmas with long memories."
"To grandmas." Sienna raised her empty hand because Lily had not handed her a glass yet. "Wine would help the toast."
"Patience is a virtue."
"Says the woman who married Alek."
"Hush."
A pot lid clattered across the hall. Then Jade's voice, loud and a little wounded already.
"Are you three doing toasts without me? I'm over here ladling and you're clinking glasses? In whose house?"
"In Lily's house," Sienna called back.
"Wrong answer. In mine, spiritually. Get in here, all of you. Now. I've been working on this for an hour and a half, and somebody is going to put a spoon in their mouth and tell me I'm a genius."
Lily looked at me with the bright eyes she got when she was about to be entertained. "After you."
I walked across the hall.
I made it through the doorway, and then my body did something I didn't understand.
The smell hit me wrong. Not in the nose.
Lower. A wave came up from my stomach so fast I had to put my hand on the doorframe and pretend I was just pausing to admire the room.
The aromatics that had smelled good from the sitting room, toasted chiles, cumin, something dark and chocolate-deep, turned in my head into something I needed to be away from.
I swallowed against it and pushed through.
Jade was at the stove in her apron, hair up, wooden spoon raised like a scepter. She looked triumphant.
"Chloe. Come. Taste."
"I'm coming."
"You're walking like a woman approaching a firing squad."
"Sorry. Hungry."
"Hungry is the correct attitude in this kitchen."
She held up the spoon. There was a glossy dark sauce on it, flecked with something red, and on a normal day I would have been all over it. I leaned in. I took the bite.
My face did a thing. I felt it happen and couldn't stop it.
"I don't like it." It came out before I could soften it. "It smells so bad. What did you put in there?"
Jade's hand went to her chest. Wooden spoon and all. "Ouch. I've never heard a knife sharper than that in my life. Sienna. Get over here. Give me a second opinion before this woman ruins my self-image."
Sienna padded in barefoot. Took the spoon, took a small dignified taste, chewed, swallowed, set the spoon down with the gravity of a judge.
"This is good," she said. "There's no foul smell. Whatever Chloe is on, it isn't the dish."
I felt my face go hot. My hand had drifted to my stomach without me telling it to. "Really? I'm so sorry. Let me try again."
"You don't have to."
"I want to."
I took another bite to make up for being rude. The smell hit me doubled this time, and before I had the spoon back down, my stomach said no, very clearly, and very fast, and I turned to the sink in one motion and was sick.
Silence behind me. The kind of silence where three women are very pointedly not looking at each other, because if they look at each other they'll confirm something.
I rinsed my mouth. I held the edge of the sink. I tried to come up with a sentence.
Lily was at my elbow before I got there. She had a clean towel in one hand and a glass of water in the other, and she'd moved without making a sound. She pressed the glass into my fingers.
"Come with me first." Her voice was low and warm, right at my ear. "Just us. Bring the water."
I followed her down the hall.
Sienna and Jade did not follow. I felt them not follow. I felt the unspoken thing sitting in the room behind us like a fourth person.
Lily's master bath was all pale marble and soft light and the faintest trace of her rose hand soap. She crossed to the vanity, pulled open a low drawer, took out a small flat box, and put it in my hand.
I looked down at it. My hand wasn't quite steady. I knew what it was before I read the front.
"You think?" My voice came out smaller than I meant.
"I do." She was already turning her back, giving me the room. Her voice stayed gentle. "Take your time."
I sat on the edge of the tub with the test on the marble counter, and I did not look at it.
I looked at my hands instead. They were folded in my lap and they looked like somebody else's hands.
I looked at the small framed satin slipper Lily kept on the shelf above the towels, the one she said reminded her of who she was before any of this.
I looked out the window at the bare branches of the oak in the courtyard, late autumn light catching on the last copper leaves.
I thought about Daniil's hand at the small of my back. I thought about the way he said my name into my hair. I thought about Rhea showing me how Beom-Beom liked to be held.
I thought, oh.
Lily was leaning against the doorframe with her arms loosely crossed when I picked up the stick. Two lines. Clear as anything.
My chest opened and closed around it at the same time. I didn't cry. I just looked at it. Then I looked up.
She read my face in a second and crossed the room in two long strides and pulled me into a hug so tight the test almost slipped out of my hand. Her arms were stronger than they looked. She held me the way somebody holds a person they've decided is theirs.
"Oh, sweet girl," she said into my hair.
I held on.
When we walked back out, Jade and Sienna were sitting on the couch in the sitting room with their hands in their laps like two students waiting for a verdict. They looked up at the same second. Their faces were already braced for it.
I tried to find my voice. I found it.
"I'm pregnant."
Jade's reaction was instant and deadpan and committed. "Sienna. Throw out the stew. That dish is officially cursed. Right, Chloe? It's awful. The whole pot."
A beat.
Then her face cracked wide open into a grin that took up the entire room. "God, I'm so happy for you."
Sienna's eyes were already wet. "Awful pot," she said, in the same dry voice she used in conference rooms. "Garbage."
They crowded me. Three sets of arms around me at once.
I felt Lily's chin on top of my head and Jade's apron string against my hip and Sienna's small steady hand on the back of my neck, and the thing I'd been holding in my chest let go, and I started to cry.
Happy cry. The kind that comes out of you when something you didn't know you wanted is suddenly real and standing in the room with you.
The door from the hall opened.
Daniil came in first. Mikhail right behind him, talking about something. Alek behind them, calmer. Ivan last, head turning automatically to scan the room the way he couldn't help doing in any room, ever.
"Good news," Daniil said as he stepped in. "No threats to the family at the moment."
He stopped.
I felt him take in the scene. Three women crying into one woman who was also crying. Four wine glasses untouched on the side table. His Chloe in the middle of it.
His eyebrows went up.
"Why is everyone hugging my girl?"
I laughed, and it came out wet and broken. I peeled myself out of the cluster and walked across the rug to him, and he opened his arm, and I fit against his chest the way I always fit.
His hand came up to the back of my head. He bent so his voice was for me only.
"Why are you crying?"
I tipped my face up. His was right there.
"I'm pregnant."
His pupils blew wide. His hand at my back went still and then pressed me closer, the whole flat of his palm, like he wanted to put himself between me and the air.
His other hand came up to cradle the back of my head.
He did not say anything for a long second.
His eyes went wet at the rim, just slightly, the way I had only seen them go wet once before.
"You are pregnant?" His voice was low and amazed. "Chloe. Say it again. I want to hear it again."
"I'm pregnant. We're pregnant."
He kissed me. Hard, the first time, like he had to. Then softer, with his thumb stroking my jaw. Then he picked me up off the floor and held me there for one slow second and set me back down, because his brothers were standing five feet away with their mouths open and he remembered they existed.
"I'm going to be an uncle?" Mikhail's voice could've rattled the windows. "You? You? Out of all of us, you go first?"
"Mikhail."
"I'm asking a respectful question, brother."
Alek's mouth was doing something rare. A real smile, small, starting at one corner and committing. "Congratulations, brother. Congratulations, Chloe."
Ivan, who never said much, said, "Good."
It came out so quiet and so warm that Jade made a small sound on the couch.
I tucked my face into Daniil's collar. He smelled like his soap and the cold air from outside and the faint clean trace of his cologne. His hand was rubbing slow circles between my shoulder blades. He hadn't let me go.
That was when I saw her.
Over his shoulder, in the doorway from the hall, with Beom-Beom tucked under one arm.
Two braids. Bare feet. Her face was doing something I'd never seen it do.
Not the carefully neutral look she wore for strangers.
Not the bright one she wore for Daniil. Something smaller.
Something that was trying very hard to be nothing at all.
Our eyes met.
She backed out of the doorway. She turned. She walked down the hall to her room. The door closed. Not slammed. Closed.
The whole room watched her go. The joy in the air dimmed one full degree.
I looked up at Daniil. He was already looking down at me. We didn't have to say anything.
"Go," Lily said quietly behind me. "We'll be here."
We went.
Down the hall. Past the side table with the photograph of all of us at the summer dinner. To her door. Daniil knocked, soft, two knuckles.
He waited. Nothing.
He knocked again.
"Rhea." His voice low through the door, careful. "May we come in?"
A beat. Then a small voice from the other side.
"Okay."
He turned the handle.
She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of her bed with Beom-Beom in her lap and both her hands wrapped around his middle. Her face had the constructed look that hurt more to see than crying. Mouth set. Eyes too wide. Chin held very, very still.
Daniil did not go to the bed. He sat down on the floor beside it, his back against the mattress, so his head was below hers. I sat down next to him. We both made ourselves smaller than her. I felt the rightness of it before I understood it.
She looked down at us. She looked at Beom-Beom. She looked back at us.
"Sorry for ruining the moment." Very small. Very honest.
"You didn't ruin anything." It came out of me before I had to think about it.
Her chin trembled. She made it stop. "I just can't stop thinking that if you have your own baby, I won't be that important anymore."
I felt my whole chest break open. Across from me, Daniil's jaw did a thing, a slow tight thing, and then his face softened into something I didn't know his face could do.
"Rhea." He said her name like he was setting it down carefully. "Listen to me. You are my sister. You will always be my sister. There is no version of this family where you are not at the center of my house. A baby does not change what you are to me. A baby adds to my house. It does not subtract."
I reached up and took her free hand in both of mine. It was small and warm. The nails were painted a pale chipped pink Lily had done for her last week.
"You're not going to get less of us, sweet girl. You're going to get more. You're going to be a big sister. Do you know what a big sister gets to do? She gets to show the baby who Beom-Beom is. She gets to be the one who knows where everything is. She gets the loudest say in what we name the baby."
She blinked. A small spark of interest cracked through the careful face.
"I get to help name them?"
"Loudest vote at the table. Daniil and I are the deciders, but yours counts most."
She thought about that. She looked at Daniil, sideways, testing.
"What if I love the baby more than I love you?"
Daniil did not even pause. Dry, and sweet, and immediate.
"Then I will know I raised you right."
A small laugh broke out of her and surprised her. Her hand twitched in mine.
"That was a joke."
"Most of it."
She looked at him for one long second and her face stopped holding itself.
She slid off the bed into the small space between us on the floor, Beom-Beom coming with her, and she fit herself against my side with her head against my shoulder and her feet tucked under Daniil's leg.
He shifted to make room. His hand came up and rested at the top of her braid, light as breath.
We sat like that.
I felt her breathing slow. I felt the warm small weight of her against my ribs. I felt Daniil's other hand find mine on the carpet between us and lace our fingers together.
Outside the room the apartment was very quiet. Down the hall I could hear, faintly, Lily saying something low to Jade, and Jade answering, and Sienna laughing once, soft. The good sound of a house with people in it who had decided to wait.
"I love you both." It came out of Rhea muffled into my collar, sleepy already.
"We love you, sweet girl," I whispered into her hair.
Daniil's thumb moved against my knuckles. He did not speak. He did not have to.
I had thought, walking into Lily's kitchen, that today would be the day I learned I was carrying a new life. It was. I had not known it would also be the day I learned what it looked like to make room at the same table for one more person without anyone losing their seat.