Chapter 30 #2
"I saw you in a coffee shop three months before I let myself walk close enough to speak to you.
I had my men gather what they could about you because that was the thing I was good at, and I told myself it was only that.
It was not only that. I was already a man who had decided.
I did not know yet what I had decided, or that the woman across that room would become the only piece of my life I would not be able to lose without losing all of it.
I only knew that the shape of your face made something in my chest go quiet for the first time in a long time. "
A small sound from somewhere in the chairs. Possibly Mikhail. Probably Mikhail.
"There was a night a stranger put something in your glass, and I carried you out of that room, and I slept on a couch a few feet from you, and in the morning you were not afraid of me.
That night something settled in me I could no longer pretend was about my work.
You cooked for me in your kitchen not long after, and I asked you if I could kiss you, and you said no, and I did not push.
That was the first time in my life I understood that wanting a thing was not the same as taking it.
You taught me that without trying. You have taught me most of what I know about being a man worth standing in this room. "
I bit the inside of my lip. Hard. Sienna was going to kill me.
"I have hurt you. I will not pretend otherwise on this day.
I started a fight in a restaurant I should not have started, and I grabbed your arm too tight on a wet sidewalk after, and you looked at me and you said the words you are scaring me.
I have carried those words in my chest every day since.
Three days later I was driving to you to ask for a chance to be a better man, and a man cut my brake line, and for three months my body was somewhere in the woods being kept alive by people I will never be able to name and never be able to thank, because they were killed for the keeping of me.
I owe a life I do not deserve to people I will never meet.
I will try to be worth it for the rest of mine. "
His thumb moved on my knuckle again.
"You walked into my brother's house as a nanny to a child I was calling my sister, and you did not say one word about who you had been to me.
You let me find my own way back. You found me crying by her bed one night and you put your hand on my face and you told me I did not have to force anything to remember, and a few nights after that the memory came back to me in a kitchen, because you had trusted me enough to stop pushing.
I make you a promise here, in front of these people.
I will not be the man who is always right.
I have tried it, and it is not a good way to be a husband.
I will be the man who keeps coming home.
I will not let you down again. I will be worthy of being the man you said yes to even when I was no one. "
"You are my home, Chloe Kim. You have been since the second I saw you, even before I knew it was you I was looking at. Take my name. Let me carry yours."
Somebody in the second row was openly crying. I was not going to look to see who. If I looked, I would lose it.
Alek nodded at me.
I took a breath. It came in shakier than I wanted. I let it out. I started.
"Daniil."
I said his name the way I had said it the first time I ever said it out loud, careful, because it was a name that mattered.
"I've spent most of my life walking out of rooms before anybody could ask me to stay.
It was a thing I was good at. I told myself it was politeness.
I told myself it was independence. It was neither.
It was me being scared. The first room I didn't walk out of was a room in a house I didn't know, the morning after a stranger put something in my drink at a club, and there was a man asleep on the couch a few feet from the bed, and I wasn't afraid.
I didn't understand yet what that meant. My body did. It knew before I did."
I felt his hand tighten around mine.
"I cooked you dinner in my apartment a little while after that, and you asked if you could kiss me and I said no, and you heard it.
Something in me moved the second you heard it.
Months later I pulled you out of a fight in a seafood restaurant and I kissed you on the sidewalk to stop you from doing something terrible, and it was the first kiss I had ever given a man to stop him instead of start something. "
I heard a small wet sound from Mikhail. I didn't look.
"For three months I sat alone in a kitchen waiting to hear that you were alive.
I heard your name on a stranger's phone one afternoon and I went to my knees on the floor.
Then I walked back into the house as a nanny for a child I hadn't met yet, and the man I loved didn't know my face.
I learned what love is when it's stripped of every piece of evidence that it should still be there.
It's still there. That's what it is. I loved you when you called yourself a name I didn't know.
I loved you when you took me for ice cream and made fun of how I held the spoon.
I loved you the night I brought soup to your room and you tried to remember me and I wouldn't let you push, because I trusted you to come back to me. You did."
I could feel tears on my cheeks. Sienna was going to bill me. I didn't care.
I looked at Daniil.
"I said I love you first at a birthday party in a kitchen full of people I love, and you said it back to me under the lights of a carnival with all of them standing in a half-circle, and I will never stop being the woman who got to hear it that way.
I'm making you a promise. I'm not going to leave the room.
Not for a fight. Not for fear. Not for three days of silence.
Not for anybody. You come back, Daniil Sorokin, and I'll already be there. Every time."
I took a small breath.
"I love you. That's the simplest thing I've ever said, and the truest, and I'll be saying it to you for the rest of my life."
Alek let the silence sit for one good second. Then, gentle:
"By the authority granted to me, and by the witness of this family, I now pronounce you husband and wife."
He looked at Daniil. There was the faintest dry warmth in his voice when he added, "You may kiss your wife."
Daniil cupped my face in both hands like I might break, which was funny because I had never felt less breakable in my life, and he kissed me. It was soft. It was not long. It was sweet enough to bruise.
The room erupted.
Mikhail let out a sound that was definitely a sob and tried to pass it off as a cough.
Ivan slow-clapped, which from Ivan was a standing ovation.
Lily was already crying into Jade's shoulder.
Sienna was crying into a tissue she had apparently brought just for herself.
My grandmother sat very straight in her chair and pressed her fingertips to her mouth and did not stop smiling.
Rhea, who had been told very clearly that the petals were to be thrown before the bride walked down the aisle, and who had apparently been hoarding a strategic reserve in her basket the entire ceremony, stood up and flung two fistfuls of rose petals into the air and yelled, "NOW," and Beom-Beom got a face full of them.
I laughed out loud, with tears still on my face, and Daniil pulled me into him and pressed his forehead to mine and laughed too, quiet, low in his chest. I felt his ring settle against my finger as his hand closed around mine.
The reception was in the long gallery off the chapel, with the doors thrown open between the rooms so that the candles and the flowers carried through.
They had set up one long table that ran the length of the gallery, white cloth, sprigs of greenery, low candles.
The string trio had picked up a fourth, a cellist, and the four of them had moved with us and tucked themselves into the corner like they belonged there.
The food was the kind where you know somebody loved every plate.
Small bowls of japchae and a quiet pile of mandu my grandmother had supervised the morning before.
Beef and bread that smelled like Daniil's childhood, by his face when it came past. At the far end of the table sat two cakes, side by side, both small, both perfect.
A neat tower of glossy white tteok stacked into a small shape on a black lacquer plate.
Beside it a tall honey-gold medovik, layered thin as paper, dusted with crushed walnut at the rim.
Both families on a table. I did not get over that for a while.
Daniil's hand stayed at the small of my back as he walked me to my seat. He pulled the chair out for me. He bent and kissed the top of my head before he sat.
Mikhail stood up before the soup had even cooled.
"Speech," he announced. "Speech speech speech. Sit down, Ivan, this is me."
"I was sitting," Ivan said.
"Sit harder."
He held a glass aloft.
"My brother," he said, and his voice cracked on it, and he gave the whole room a moment to laugh at him about it.
"My brother, Daniil Sorokin, who, when we threw a small child's birthday party in this very compound, insisted on wearing a small pink kiddie hat shaped like a crown.
With the elastic. Under the chin. I have photographs. "
"Mikhail," Daniil said.
"I have so many photographs."
"Mikhail."
"My brother, who, when he decided he was going to propose to this woman, was unable, despite being feared in twelve countries, to plan a single proposal.
We had to do it for him. We had to stage an intervention.
Three Bratva enforcers in a kitchen at midnight planning a proposal like teenage girls.
Ivan, tell them how many times I cried."
"Two," Ivan said.
"Three."
"Two."
"Three is fine."