“Nikolai Rogov.”
The priest’s voice pulls me back.
“Do you take Lauren Watson to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
I say yes before he finishes the sentence.
A quiet laugh moves through the congregation. Lauren’s eyes are bright.
“And Lauren Watson—do you take Nikolai Rogov to be your lawfully wedded husband, in sickness and in health?”
She holds my gaze for a long moment. I watch her take a slow breath, and I watch something settle across her face—not hesitation, but the particular stillness of a person arriving at something they’ve been moving toward for a long time.
“Yes,” she says. “I do.”
My hands are less steady than they were at Pullman Yard. I am aware of this and have no way to address it.
I take the ring from the box and slide it onto her finger, and she does the same for me—her touch light and deliberate—and then the priest says the words, I bring her in, one arm around her waist, careful of the pregnancy, and kiss my wife for the first time.
She tastes like something I don’t have a word for. The applause from the congregation is gentle, warm, and reminds usthat we’re not alone. We pull apart and she laughs a little, and I press my forehead briefly to hers before we turn to face the people close to us.
We walk back down the aisle hand in hand, husband and wife, Hannah falling into step beside us and slipping her small hand into mine without being asked.
“You’re mine,” I say quietly, close to Lauren’s ear. “For good. No more complications.”
She squeezes my hand. “No more complications,” she agrees. Then, after a beat: “Until the end of time.”
I feel the smile before I can do anything about it.
“Until the end of time.”
Epilogue
Lauren
The visiting room smells of industrial cleaner and something underneath it that no amount of cleaner fully reaches.
I give the receptionist my name and follow her directions down the corridor, counting doors. Fourth on the right. I stop outside it and take a breath before pushing it open.
I’m still not entirely sure what brought me here today. I’ve thought about this visit for years—turned it over, postponed it, found reasons why the timing wasn’t right. There was always something more immediate: Hannah needing me, moving into Nikolai’s estate and turning it into our home, the slow work of rebuilding a life that felt safe enough to actually live in. And then Misha arrived, and the first year of that swallowed everything else whole.
It was Nikolai who finally said it plainly, the way he says most things. That it might be worth doing. That some things don’t resolve themselves on their own. I told him I had closure—I have him, I have our children, I have a life I couldn’t have imagined six years ago—and he just looked at me in that particular way of his and said nothing further, which is somehow more persuasive than anything he could have said.
So here I am.
I push open the door.
He sees me immediately. He’s been sitting at the table for some time by the look of it, hands folded in front of him, and when I walk in he straightens—a reflex, the old habit of a man who always wanted to control how he was perceived. I notice it and feel something complicated move through me.
He looks dreadful.
The years have not been kind, and prison has accelerated whatever the years started. He was never a heavy man, but the weight he’s lost has taken something structural with it—his face is gaunt, the skin sitting differently over the bones beneath. The orange of the uniform drains what color he had left.
He looks smaller than I remember. Diminished in a way that goes beyond the physical. Like a man who has had a very long time alone with himself and found the company difficult.
“Lauren.”
His voice has changed too. The particular quality it used to have—that tone of a man accustomed to filling rooms, to having the last word—is gone. What’s left is quieter, rougher, and oddly stripped of affect.
