“You’realive,” I say. “You looked like death when I took you out of that car.”
“I felt like it.”
“I love you,” I say again, because maybe he didn’t hear it last time, and if he were to die today I would need, more than anything, for him to know. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I’ve been loving you, it was impossible to stop.”
Maxim smiles, his eyes sparkling, and pushes my curls behind my ear.
“I know,” he said, the same way I did the last time he told me. “I’ve known, Marianna.”
“I haven’t made it easy for you. Not once since demanding you marry me have I been lovely or accommodating, or even very nice,” I tell him. I remember the speech I’d prepared for him in December, the laundry list of reasons he shouldn’t want to marry me.
“I think you’re nice,” he says and I shush him.
“Let me say this. IknowI am hard to love, hard to be around sometimes, but please don’t stop loving me. Please stay when I’m rude and off-putting and impulsive.”
“Darling—”
“No, listen. Maxim, you are the most excellent man I have ever known. You are thoughtful and smart and more understanding and patient than anyone would ever expect from you. You are so thoroughly good that you make me want to be better, kinder, less murderous every day. You are too good for this world of organized crime and blood and sabotage, but you do it anyway because you don’t have a choice, and I’m so unbelievably selfish because even if youdidhave a way out, I would beg you to stay with me.”
Maxim’s thumbs wipe under my eyes, and I babble on.
“I know I’m not. . .easy. I know that. And I used to think you’d be better off with someone like Elise, or like who we thought Elise was, but the truth is, I would do terrible things to keep you. I’d kill fifteen Colton Tennesons, I’d rob a bank, or I’d promise to never kill again. I’d get a desk job.”
Maxim laughs at this last one, and I do too.
He pulls me to him and kisses me so sweetly before cradling my face in both hands so I can look nowhere but at him.
“Nothing has ever been so simple as loving you,” he says. “Nothing is so natural or inevitable. There’s nothing about you that’s hard to love, not a single thing, Marianna.”
I don’t know how to believe his words, butheseems to believe them, which is enough.
“You are so treasured, not just by me, but by everyone who you let in. Your sister’s children worship you, your family adores you. You are so full of light, I didn’t stand a chance.”
“I’m a shadow of a person,” I whisper and he kisses me again.
“You have never been a shadow.”
As we kiss and smile and laugh and kiss some more, I decide that maybe there’s not a limit to how much love one person can hold.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if it comes with more stress, more hurt. Maybe love expands your very capacity to love more until it’s all you are.
I think I’d like to believe that.
42
MAXIM
Other than mybrief stint in the hospital last month, I haven’t been inside an honest-to-God doctor’s office for years, and this one is different than any I can remember. It’s inviting instead of sterile, everything about it designed to be soft, light, and optimistic.
There are parenting guides and cardboard children’s books on the tables, photos of brilliantly smiling families on the walls, and two other couples in the waiting room. I look again at Marianna’s abdomen, covered by the black overall dress she’s wearing, but if I press the fabric to her front, I know I’m not imagining the bump that’s visible there.
Marianna is a small, incredibly muscular woman. I admittedly know very little about gestation, but it seems early still for her belly to be rounding.
She bites the skin around her nail before stopping suddenly and stuffing her hands under her thighs. She’s been nervous about today, concerned that when they finally do an ultrasound, they’ll find nothing there.
“What if it’s a false alarm? Like maybe it’s been just a parasite making me sick instead of a fetus,” she said in the car ride here. She drove us since my foot is still wrapped in a hard cast for afew weeks more and Samuel, while still alive, is no longer in our employ. I miss him more than I like to admit.
“A parasite that stops your period and gives you positive pregnancy tests?” I asked.
