48. Sofia
SOFIA
Twenty weeks along, and my dress had been let out twice already, my body renegotiating every seam faster than anyone could keep up with.
I stood at the edge of the same backyard where I'd once lost an entire paycheck to Yuri at cards, string lights strung overhead in the same loose, uneven loops, and thought about how little of this life I could have predicted from a dock in the middle of the night.
Somewhere behind me, Elena knelt at the hem of my dress with a needle pinched between her lips, still not satisfied with a stitch she'd already redone twice.
My abuela would have loved her instantly, would have loved all of it, the string lights, the mismatched chairs, the enormous man currently arguing with Yuri about whether the ribs needed another twenty minutes, though she'd have had opinions about a dress that still needed fitting on the day of the wedding itself.
"Stop fidgeting," Elena said around the needle. "You're worse than Kirill was at his own wedding, and he cried through the entire thing."
"I did not cry," Kirill called from somewhere near the grill, without turning around.
"You absolutely cried."
"That was smoke."
"There was no smoke that day. It was indoors."
"You look terrifying," Nina said, adjusting the strap of my dress with the focus of a woman defusing something explosive. "In the good way. The way that makes everyone in this yard a little afraid of you, which, given your résumé, feels appropriate."
"I'm not planning on arresting anyone tonight."
"You say that now."
The chairs filled fast once Kirill gave up trying to arrange them into anything resembling straight rows, and by the time the music started, I found Maxim waiting at the end of the aisle in a suit that fit him the way every suit apparently did, sleeves down for once, cuffs buttoned, working hard to look like this didn't matter to him more than anything else in his life.
It mattered. I could see it in the way his jaw worked when I started walking, in the way his eyes went bright and stayed that way through the whole ceremony.
The officiant kept things short, which I'd requested twice and Kirill had ignored both times while drafting his own version of the program, and then it was vows, and then it was Nina stepping up with a folded index card she clearly hadn't needed.
"I've known Sofia four years," she began, "and in that time she has lied to me exactly twice. Once about liking my cooking. Once about how she actually felt about the man standing in front of her right now."
Laughter rolled through the yard, warm and easy.
"I also want it on record that I have never, not once, had to bail this woman out of an actual arrest, despite several close calls involving forklifts, badges, and one memorable evening with a man who owns half the ports on this coast." Nina raised her glass toward Maxim, who accepted it with the resigned grace of a man who'd clearly heard worse.
"Sofia, you taught me that the bravest thing a person can do isn't chasing down criminals.
It's telling the truth to someone who could destroy you with it.
I watched you do that the hard way, and I've never been prouder of anyone in my life.
To the bride, who somehow survived both an arrest warrant and a wedding planning committee run entirely by Kirill. "
"To Sofia," the yard echoed, and I laughed hard enough that Maxim's hand found the small of my back to steady me.
Kirill stood next, and I braced myself the way everyone else already had.
"I've known Maxim twenty years," he said, "and I've watched a lot of women walk through that gate.
None of them survived past week three. Sofia showed up covered in the first of what turned out to be several truly heroic amounts of gas station coffee, and I remember thinking, this one's going to be a problem.
" He raised his glass toward me. "I was right.
She's been a problem since day one. Best problem this family's ever had. "
"Get to the coffee, Kirill," Maxim said.
"I'm getting there." Kirill cleared his throat with theatrical patience.
"The suit was three thousand dollars. The thermos survived.
The man did not, emotionally, though it took him considerably longer to admit that than it took the rest of us to notice.
To this day, I have personally witnessed Maxim Kuznetsov ruin four more suits in the name of this woman, two of them on purpose, because apparently getting coffee spilled on him became some kind of tradition he refuses to explain. "
"It's not a tradition."
"It's absolutely a tradition." Kirill lifted his glass higher. "To Sofia, who ruined my best friend's wardrobe and somehow improved everything else about him. Here's hoping your future arguments are shorter than his suit-cleaning bills."
The laughter hadn't fully died down when I spotted them near the back, a man I'd only ever seen in photographs and heard over speakerphone, standing beside a woman with kind eyes, a travel bag still sitting at her feet like they'd come straight from the airport.
"You made it," Maxim said, and something in his voice had gone unguarded in a way I rarely heard, even with me.
"We weren't going to miss this." Andrei pulled his brother into an embrace that lasted a beat longer than either of them probably intended, and when he stepped back, his eyes were suspiciously bright.
"This is Talia. My wife. She's heard about you for months and refused to believe you were real until she saw you in person. "
"The famous Sofia." Talia took both my hands, warm and immediate. "He talks about you like you hung the moon. I had to see for myself."
"I'm not sure I've hung anything. I mostly just ruined his suits."
"That tracks with everything I've heard." Talia laughed, glancing between me and Maxim with something soft in her expression. "I'm glad. He needed someone who wasn't afraid of him."
Andrei's palm landed on Maxim's shoulder and stayed there a moment too long. "You look happy, brother. It suits you better than the suits ever did."
"We're not doing the suit jokes twice tonight."
"Apparently we are." Andrei smiled, and for one unscripted moment the two of them looked like exactly what they were, brothers who had built two entirely different lives out of the same inheritance and somehow still found their way back to the same yard.
"He called me every week the whole time you two were apart," Talia said quietly, just to me, once the men had drifted toward the grill to inspect Kirill's ongoing crimes against a rack of ribs.
"I've never heard him that worried about anything.
I told him people who love each other that much usually find their way back, and he told me I didn't understand how complicated it was. "
"'Complicated' is generous."
"Everything worth having usually is." She squeezed my hand once more before letting go. "I'm glad we finally get to do this in person instead of over a phone line with terrible reception. Andrei's been promising for two years that we'd visit properly."
"You're welcome anytime, and I mean it. Bring the kids next time. Bring all of them."
"I'm holding you to that. Someone in this family needs to see my children more than twice a year, and it clearly isn't going to be their uncle if he keeps hiding out on this side of an ocean."
The toasts wound down into easy conversation, plates of food, Kirill arguing with Yuri again about the ribs, and somewhere in the middle of it Nina pulled me aside long enough to press a glass of sparkling water into my hand.
"Callahan got sentenced last week," she said quietly. "Twenty-two years, no parole hearing until he's an old man. The financial trail you found did more damage than four years of surveillance ever managed."
"And Doyle?"
"Confirmed dead. They finally pulled a body matching his dental records out of the water near the terminal two weeks after the raid." She squeezed my hand. "It's over, Sofia. All of it. You can stop checking exits in restaurants now."
"I don't know if I'll ever fully stop."
"No. But you don't do it alone anymore, which was always the actual problem."
She was right, and I didn't have a comeback for it, so I let her be right and hugged her instead.
When the officiant called us back for vows, I stood across from Maxim under the string lights, one hand resting on the curve of my stomach without meaning to, the whole yard gone quiet in a way that made the moment feel enormous and small at once.
"I promised myself I wouldn't like you," I said, my voice steadier than I expected.
"Three weeks into a job I was never supposed to fall in love with, standing in a floodlit yard with coffee down my sleeve and your handkerchief in my hand, I made myself a promise I broke within about ninety seconds.
I've broken it a little more every single day since, and I intend to keep breaking it for the rest of my life.
You are the best, most inconvenient thing that ever happened to me, and I would let a forklift take me out again if it meant landing in your arms a second time. "
Someone in the crowd laughed, wet and helpless, and I was fairly sure it was Kirill.
"I love you," I said simply. "Not the version of me you built out of surveillance photos. Not the version you thought you were marrying that first ruined night. Just me. All of it. I'm yours."
"I restore old things for a living," Maxim said, his voice quieter than I'd ever heard it in public, steady in a way that only made it land harder.
"I take something ruined and I put it back together one careful piece at a time, and I always told myself that was the only kind of repair I understood.
Then a woman fell into my arms on a dock and ruined a suit and every plan I had for my own life, and I've spent every day since discovering I didn't actually know the first thing about putting anything back together until I met her. "
Somewhere behind me, Kirill made a sound suspiciously close to a sob and covered it badly with a cough.
"You make me better at being a man I used to think I'd already finished becoming," Maxim went on, his eyes never once leaving mine.
"You make me want to be careful with things again, not because I'm afraid of losing them, but because they're worth the care.
I promise to roll my sleeves up for you and only for you from now on.
I promise to keep restoring things badly, in your honor, because apparently that's a tradition now.
And I promise that whatever comes for us, badges or gates or forklifts, I will choose you every single time, the same way I chose you the first night, before I even knew your real name. "
By the time the officiant pronounced us husband and wife, the whole yard was on its feet, string lights blurring gold through my own tears.
I found Maxim's eyes over the noise of it, over Kirill already shouting something about ribs and Nina wiping her face with the back of her hand, and mouthed two words across the space between us.
You're still trouble.
He mouthed it right back, slow and certain, and then, with everyone watching and nobody understanding why, he rolled his sleeves up, one careful turn and then the other, an old habit that used to warn men to be afraid and now just meant he was about to kiss his wife.
The whole yard laughed, not knowing why, and I laughed hardest of all, because I was the only one who did.