Ruslan is sitting on the steps of the east outbuilding with his arm wrapped in field dressing that someone applied badly. Definitely not Polina’s work. He looks up when I come down the front steps.
“Frol?” he asks.
“Alive. Boris has him.”
He nods once and winces as he adjusts the arm. “Your father?”
I press my lips into a thin line and nod back. “Done.”
He nods again, slower this time, and doesn’t ask me how I am, which is the right call. Right now isn’t the time to unpack all that.
“There’s a vehicle waiting at the east gate,” he tells me. “Boris arranged it.”
“Give me a minute.”
I walk to the gate and look out at the road running northeast. Sometime in the last hour, I stopped wondering whether I was coming back, and the only person I want to tell is three kilometers away.
I don’t wait for the vehicle. I start walking.
The road is straight and flat, and the morning has gone eerily quiet. My ears are still ringing from the flashbang. My jaw aches where Frol’s elbow landed. None of it matters as much as the forward position coming into view around the next bend, and the woman waiting there with no way to know if I was coming back.
She told me to come back. She threw my own words at me like a demand, and I held onto those words through every floor of that building.
I’m two hundred meters down the road when I see her.
She’s already running.
I don’t know how long she’s been moving, but she’s running toward me with her coat open and her hair loose and no medical bag, which means she left in a hurry, and that does more damage to me than the entire firefight managed to do.
I catch her when she reaches me, and neither of us lets go.
She doesn’t say anything at first. Neither do I. She has both arms around my neck and her face buried against my shoulder, and I can feel her breathing in short, uneven pulls.
“You’re bleeding,” she observes with a gasp.
“It’s not mine.”
Her eyes are red at the rims, and she reaches up and traces her fingers along my jaw where Frol’s elbow connected, checking the damage. I catch her hand and hold it against my face.
“I’m all right,” I tell her.
“Boris stopped answering about you. The radio went quiet and nobody had eyes on you and I—” She stops, swallows, then tries again. “I thought…Don’t ever do that to me again.”
I can’t stop the smile that spreads across my face. “I’m sorry.”
Something in her face gives way, and she blurts out, “I love you. I didn’t plan to say that standing in the middle of a road. But there it is.”
I pull her back against me and kiss the top of her head, holding her there. “I love you. I’ve loved you since before I had the right to. Since before you knew my name.”
She giggles and shakes her head. “This is going to be a very strange story to tell our child.”
“We’ll leave out some parts.”
She tips her face up, and I kiss her there, still surrounded by chaos and the residuals of war.
As we start walking back together, I know that a year from now, I won’t be able to tell you the exact words she used. But I’ll remember this road. The cold. The quiet. The way she looked at me after she said it, like she was waiting to see what I’d do with it.
Now she knows.
