This is what a real family looks like.
It’s nothing like the Savitsky version. The careful, silent dinners and the closed study doors and the whiskey glass and the wordwhorethrown at your daughter because she dared to make a choice about her own body.
This is loud and warm and slightly chaotic, with a baby asleep in a stranger's arms and a mother who calls you sweetheart like she means it.
I hand Lorcan back to Grace when he starts to stir, and she takes him with the practiced ease of a woman who could do this blindfolded. "Thank you," she says, and I nod, and I don't trust myself to speak because I know my voice will betray me.
Aidan is watching, but when I glance at him, he looks away. Gives me the space to feel whatever I'm feeling without making me explain it.
I'm starting to understand why that's the most dangerous thing about him.
After breakfast, we walk back toour home. The morning has warmed and the light is gold now, catching the dew on the grass and making everything look like something from a painting. Aidan walks beside me with his hands in his pockets, matchingmy pace the way he always does, and the silence between us has changed again. It's softer now. Comfortable in a way that makes me uneasy, because I don't get comfortable. Comfortable is how you get caught off guard.
But my body feels loose and my stomach is full and there's still the faint ghost of baby weight against my chest, and I can't quite summon the rigidity I need.
"Your family is..." I start, and then stop, because I don't have the right word.
"Loud," Aidan offers.
"Warm."
He looks at me. A sideways glance, quick, like he's checking whether I meant it.
"They're warm," I say again. "That's not something I'm used to."
We reach the building that was once the stables and is now a spacious home, and he opens the door for me. I walk inside and stand in the living room, and really look at this space he built with his own hands. The beams. The fireplace. The deep sofa that has a knitted blanket draped over one arm. It smells like fresh paint, old wood, and him.
I sit on the sofa. He sits beside me. Close enough that I could reach for him if I wanted to.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"You keep asking if you can ask me things,” I say, trying not to sound exasperated or cold. “We’re married. Just ask."
The corner of his mouth twitches. "Fair enough." He leans back, stretches his arm along the back of the sofa, and his fingertips are inches from my shoulder. "You said you wanted out of this life. I've always been able to see that. But I've never known what you wanted instead."
The question hits differently than I expect. Not because it's invasive, but because no one's ever asked before.
My father never asked what I wanted. He told me what I would be. My mother didn't ask because she'd already accepted that wanting was irrelevant. And every other person in the Bratva who's ever looked at me saw a daughter, a commodity, a bride, a surname. Not a person with a direction.
"You don't have to answer," Aidan says. Reading me again. Seeing the hesitation and giving me the exit before I need it.
"No, I..." I pull my legs up underneath me on the sofa and wrap my arms around myself. A defensive posture. I know that. He probably knows it too. "I wanted to study. That's the embarrassing truth. The ice queen of the Savitsky family wanted to go to college."
"That's not embarrassing."
"It is when your father tells you that education is wasted on daughters who exist to be married. He said it at dinner once. In front of guests." I hear myself speaking and I sound like I'm narrating someone else's life. Flat. Detached. But Aidan is sitting beside me and his fingertips are warm near my shoulder and for some reason, the flatness starts to crack. "I wanted to study psychology. I read every book I could find. Quietly. In my room. Like it was contraband." A breath of laughter that doesn't quite land escapes my chest. "In a Bratva household, textbooks on human behavior are more dangerous than weapons."
"What drew you to it?"
"People fascinate me." I turn the admission over in my mouth after I say it, testing whether I regret it. I don't. "Not in a warm, I-love-humanity way. More like... I wanted to understand why people do what they do. Why my father is the way he is. Why my mother stayed as long as she did. Why she left. Why everyone inthis world performs all the time, and what happens to the parts of themselves they bury to keep the performance going."
"You wanted to understand yourself," Aidan says.
I look at him. He's not smiling. He's not analyzing. He's just there, steady and present, and the observation is so precise that it makes a lump form in my throat.
"Yes," I say quietly. "I suppose I did."
His fingertips gently stroke over my shoulder. "You still can."
