Despite his black suit and tie, he still looks like he could disarm someone between courses.
Katya appears beside me and links her arm through mine. Dmitri’s wife has a talent for materializing at the moment you need company and didn’t know it.
“You doing okay over here?” she asks.
“I’m enjoying the music.”
“You’re hovering near the exit.” She steers me toward the center of the terrace, where Mila is arranging dessert plates with the focus of a battlefield surgeon. “Come. Eat cake. Be social.”
“Iambeing social.”
“Standing alone at a party does not count as socializing.” She releases my arm and hands me a plate with a slice of something layered and obscene. “Sasha will kill me if her cousin doesn’t eat.”
I take a bite because arguing with Katya is pointless. The cake is extraordinary, and I say so.
“Mila found the bakery,” Katya informs me. “She taste-tested nine before settling on this one. Alexei claims he gained four kilos during the selection process.”
Mila rolls her eyes without looking up from her plates. “He ate every reject. Nobody forced him.”
I’ve come to learn that this is what family sounds like. Not the version I grew up with, where silence meant safety and laughter meant someone was about to get hurt, but easy and warm and full of people who argue about dessert and say what they mean without consequences.
I’ve spent months circling the edges of this family like a stray. Pyotr brought me in. Dmitri vouched for me. But belonging is harder than access. It requires the kind of trust I forgot how to give a long time ago.
Tonight, for the first time, I’m standing in the middle of it. And nothing hurts.
Kira races past with Tony’s sunglasses now perched on Rex’s plastic snout, and Tony is trailing behind her with the patient resignation of a man who has realized that arguing with a small child is a losing battle. Sasha intercepts them near the fountain, scoops Kira onto her hip, and whispers something that makes my daughter dissolve into giggles.
I watch Sasha hold my kid like Kira belongs here, and something deep in my chest unknots.
“She’s good with her,” Pyotr muses as he appears beside me.
“Sasha is amazing with everyone.”
He takes the champagne from my hand and sets it on the nearest table. “Dance with me.”
“You don’t dance.”
“I do tonight.”
He leads me to the small dance floor that’s been set up between the terrace and the fountain, where two other couples are swaying to the quartet. His right hand settles on the small of my back, and I rest my palm against his chest. We move in a slow circle in tune with the music, lost in one another.
“Are you happy?” he asks.
I sputter my lips and reply, “Disgustingly.”
“Good.” He chuckles.
We dance through one full song and halfway through the next before Dmitri’s voice cuts through the music from the terrace steps. He’s holding a glass of vodka and wearing the closest thing to a smile I’ve ever seen on his face, which is to say his jaw has relaxed approximately two degrees.
“If I could have everyone’s attention.”
The garden goes quiet. Sasha leans into Tony’s side, and he wraps his arm around her waist.
Dmitri raises his glass. “To my sister and the man who dares to love her. Tony, you are either the bravest or most foolish person I have ever met, marrying my sister a year ago. Either way, we’re thrilled you’re part of the family.”
The crowd laughs as Tony kisses Sasha’s temple, and she smiles up at him with something so open it makes my chest ache in the best possible sense.
Pyotr’s hand tightens on my waist. I glance up and find him watching Tony and Sasha with a look that I’ve learned to translate over the past two months. A man imagining a future and being terrified of how badly he wants it.
