And in the middle of all of it, Maks and Maya were having what could only be described as an academic cage match.
"Your algorithm is missing critical differential inputs," Maya said, her fork punctuating the air like a scalpel. "You can't just feed symptoms into a machine and expect accurate diagnoses. Medicine isn't math."
"Medicine is absolutely math." Maks's eyes were bright with the particular enthusiasm he got when someone challenged his systems. "Statistics. Probability. Pattern recognition. Everythingyou do intuitively, my algorithm does faster and without the cognitive biases of human—"
"Cognitive biases are what tell me a patient is lying about their symptoms because they're scared or embarrassed. Can your algorithm read shame on someone's face?"
"Given enough training data, yes, actually—"
"You're both insufferable," Nikolai said, but his mouth was twitching. The Pakhan mask had slipped hours ago, replaced by the man who loved his family enough to let them be annoying in his presence. "Can we eat one meal without the dissertation defense?"
"She started it," Maks said.
"He started it," Maya said, at the exact same time.
Sophie looked up from where Katya was latched to her breast, completely unbothered by the public nursing that had made Alexei uncomfortable the first time but everyone else had adjusted to. Her eyes were sharp despite the exhaustion of new motherhood.
"Maks's algorithm would have missed my pre-eclampsia," she said casually. "Maya caught it at thirty-two weeks because she noticed I was eating pickles differently."
The table went quiet. Not the bad kind—the kind where everyone was processing new information.
"Eating pickles differently?" Alexei asked, his gruff voice carrying confusion.
"My hand tremor was worse when I reached for the jar," Sophie explained. "Maya was watching because she watches everything. She didn't even realize she was doing it. But she made me take my blood pressure and—" She shrugged, adjusting Katya with practiced ease. "Caught it early. Bed rest. Baby lived. I lived. Because of pickles."
Maya's face was going red. The praise made her uncomfortable—always had, probably always would.
"The algorithm would have caught it too," she said quietly. "Eventually. After the bloodwork came back wrong."
"But Maya caught it first." Sophie met her eyes across the table with the particular intensity of a woman who'd almost died and knew exactly who to thank for her survival. "That's my point."
Maks held up his hands in surrender. "Fine. The algorithm supplements human intuition. It doesn't replace it. Happy?"
"Ecstatic," Maya said dryly. "Now fix your symptom categories. You're missing medication interactions entirely."
The argument resumed, but softer now. More collaborative. Maks pulling out his tablet, Maya leaning over to point at specific failures, their voices overlapping in the particular rhythm of people who respected each other enough to fight productively.
I watched.
That was my role, mostly. Watch the room. Track the threats. Make sure nothing disrupted the fragile peace we'd all built.
But tonight I was watching Maya specifically. The way her hands moved when she explained something, the precision of someone who'd spent years in operating rooms. The way she forgot to eat because her brain was too busy with the argument, her plate still half-full while everyone else was reaching for seconds. The way she belonged here—not as my woman, not as someone being protected, but as herself.
Brilliant. Argumentative. Occasionally forgetting to exist because her mind was somewhere more interesting.
Family had noticed. They'd started reminding her to eat without being asked, passing dishes her direction with pointed looks, making sure she didn't vanish into her own head and neglect her body.
This was what I'd been building toward. Even when I didn't know it. Even when I thought I was just keeping her alive, just protecting her from danger, just solving the immediate problemof a woman who'd seen too much and knew too much and needed someone to make sure she survived.
I hadn't been building survival. I'd been building this.
A table full of people who would kill for her—literally, without hesitation—and also tease her about her Bluey obsession and make sure she ate and argue with her about machine learning until everyone else wanted to throw bread at their heads.
Family. The real kind. The kind you chose.
Maya glanced up from Maks's tablet, probably feeling my attention. Her eyes found mine across the chaos—the arguments, the baby fussing, Dmitry saying something threatening to Ivan about borrowed tools—and something passed between us.
Gratitude. Understanding.
