I wait.
“Good behavior. There’s a possibility of house arrest—not soon, but possible.” He looks at me steadily, without the performance I used to associate with him. “If that happens, and if you were willing—I’d like to be part of their lives. Slowly. On whatever terms you set.” He pauses. “I’d like to try to be their grandfather.”
The room is very quiet.
I think about what Nikolai will say. I already know, roughly—he’ll listen, he’ll give me his honest view, and then he’ll tell me it’s my call.
I think about my children growing up with all of the people who love them close, and I think about what it cost me to grow up without that—and I think about the man across this table, stripped of everything he used to hide behind, asking me for something I’m not sure he deserves and might give him anyway.
“With time,” I say. “Perhaps.”
He holds my gaze, and for a moment he looks like my father again—the real one, the one who existed before everything else. The buzzer sounds from somewhere down the corridor, flat and final.
I stand, push my chair back in, and reach for my bag.
“Till next time, father.”
The spark that crosses his eyes then is small, uncertain, but real.
“Till next time, daughter.”
The afternoon sun hits me the moment I step outside, warm and immediate after the flat chill of the visiting room.
Nikolai is leaning against the car in the parking lot, arms folded, watching the entrance. He sees me before I’ve fully cleared the door—he always does—and straightens without making a production of it.
He’s in jeans and a plain white t-shirt, sleeves pushed up, the tattoos visible from twenty feet away. He made an attempt at ordinary and the attempt is sincere, but there are things about Nikolai Rogov that no amount of suburban clothing will ever fully domesticate. The size of him. The way he holds a parking lot like it’s a room he’s already assessed. The eyes that find you and stay.
I’ve stopped trying to explain it to people who ask. Some things you just learn to live alongside.
I walk up to him and he opens his arms. I step into them, pressing my face briefly against his chest. He holds me for a moment without speaking—long enough to understand that the visit went the way it went, not catastrophically, not cleanly, somewhere in the complicated middle ground where most true things seem to live.
“How was it?” he says into my hair.
“Hard,” I say. “Okay. Both.”
He nods. He doesn’t push.
I pull back and look up at him. “He might get house arrest. Good behavior.” I pause. “He wants to meet the children.”
Nikolai's expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes does—the quiet, rapid calculation of a man who loves his family more than anything. Then it settles.
“Your call,” he says.
He opens the car door and I slide in, and he comes around to the driver’s side and we pull out of the lot, merging onto the highway. The sky ahead is wide and golden, the afternoon light doing something generous with everything it touches.
“Sophia texted,” he says. “Hannah has apparently decided that Misha’s first word should be taught to him by her, and Misha is apparently not cooperating.”
“What word is she trying to teach him?”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “She hasn’t disclosed that. Which concerns me.”
I laugh. It comes out easier than I expected, given the last hour, and I let it.
A flight to Malibu is waiting at the end of this drive—our children, Sophia and Timur, whatever small domestic chaos Hannah has orchestrated in our absence. Sophia and Timur have been staying there with the kids so that Nikolai and I could enjoy some alone time in Atlanta… and renovate the estate.
I look out at the highway unspooling ahead of us, at the sky turning from gold to the first pale edge of evening, at my husband’s hand resting on the gearshift between us.
Six years ago, I walked into a wedding that wasn’t mine, looking for answers, and found something I wasn’t looking for at all. A man I wasn’t supposed to trust. A life I hadn’t planned for. A version of myself I didn’t know existed yet—one who could survive grief and fear and the particular darkness of loving someone in a world that kept trying to take them.
