This was our life now, documented and displayed like we were normal people with normal memories worth preserving.
The kitchen smelled like disaster and cinnamon. I'd attempted Dmitry's grandmother's Russian tea cakes again, and whilethey looked right this time—golden-brown, dusted with enough powdered sugar to cause respiratory distress—they tasted like sweet cardboard. The recipe card, yellowed with age and written in Cyrillic that Dmitry had to translate, sat propped against the mixer looking innocent.
"Third batch this week," I muttered, poking one of the offensive cookies. "How hard can butter, flour, and sugar be?"
Bear padded over, all seventy pounds of him moving with the delusion that he was still the tiny puppy who fit in my lap. His orthopedic bed—a ridiculously expensive thing I'd insisted on when the vet mentioned hip problems common to pit bulls—sat abandoned in the corner. He preferred the couch, the bed, anywhere his humans were.
"These are terrible too, aren't they?" I asked him, breaking off a piece of cookie.
He took it delicately, chewed twice, then very politely spat it onto the kitchen floor and looked at me with betrayal in his eyes.
"Traitor," I said, but scratched behind his ears anyway. "Dmitry will eat them. He ate the last batch that was basically charcoal."
Bear huffed, clearly conveying that love had limits and those limits were reached when cookies could double as weapons.
After dinner—something edible that Dmitry cooked while I cleaned up my baking disaster—we headed to the workshop. It had been just his space initially, all dangerous tools and gun oil, the place where he cleaned weapons and occasionally built things I didn't ask about. Now half of it was mine. I had my own set of restoration tools organized on pegboard he'd installed at the perfect height for me. Tiny screwdrivers and pliers, bottles of brass polish and wood oil, boxes of salvaged parts sorted by mechanism type.
I’d been learning.
"So, what’s your diagnosis, doctor. You're think it's broken?" Dmitry asked, watching me examine the music box he'd brought home last week.
It was a disaster—water damage had warped the wood base, the male dancer was missing his entire left side, the female dancer's porcelain face had a crack running from forehead to chin. The mechanism inside ground and stuck when you tried to wind it, probably full of rust and broken teeth. Any reasonable person would have tossed it.
"Nothing's really broken," I said, already losing myself in the puzzle of it. "Just needs to be fixed."
He settled at his own bench, cleaning and oiling a Glock with the same focused attention I was giving to the music boxes. We worked in comfortable silence, the only sounds Bear's snoring and the quiet clink of tools.
The female dancer came free first, and I set her gently aside. Her dress was moth-eaten tulle, but the structure underneath was good. The male dancer was worse—someone had tried to glue him back together with what looked like chewing gum and desperation.
"This is actually three different dancers," I said, amused despite myself. "Someone made a Frankenstein dancer out of broken parts."
Dmitry had patiently shown me how to restore and repair the music boxes. He still did the most difficult jobs, but I was learning fast.
"Sounds familiar," Dmitry said, and I looked up to find him watching me with that soft expression that still made my stomach flip.
"Are you calling us Frankenstein monsters?"
"I'm saying we're both built from broken parts that shouldn't work together but do."
The honesty of it, casual and profound, made my throat tight. I focused on the mechanism to avoid crying over a music box like some kind of Victorian maiden.
The spring was shot, but I had a collection of springs salvaged from other boxes. The pins on the cylinder were bent but not broken—careful pressure with needlenose pliers straightened them enough to catch the comb teeth. The male dancer was trickier. I ended up fabricating his entire left side from parts of three different dancers, using jewelry wire to create joints that moved.
"That's cheating," Dmitry said, now standing behind me to watch.
"That's art," I corrected. "Taking what exists and making it into what it needs to be."
Two hours later, I had something that might work. The dancers stood ready, held by wires I'd reinforced with drops of superglue. The mechanism was clean, oiled, fitted with a spring that was almost the right size. The cylinder turned freely when I tested it with my finger.
"Moment of truth," I said, and turned the key.
The mechanism caught, held, then released with a grinding sound that made me wince. But then—music. Stuttering and imperfect, skipping notes where pins were missing, but recognizable. "La Vie en Rose," tinny and sweet, as the dancers began their jerky waltz. The male dancer's improvised left side moved slightly out of sync with his right, and the female dancer's cracked face caught the workshop light in a way that made her look like she was crying crystal tears.
But they danced. These broken, rebuilt, impossible dancers circled each other in their stuttering waltz, and it was beautiful because it shouldn't have been possible at all.
His lips found my neck, just above the collar, that spot that made me shiver every time. "My clever girl," he murmured against my skin. "Making broken things beautiful."
"We're not broken anymore," I said, watching the dancers turn their imperfect circles. "Just . . . creatively repaired."
