She didn't apologize. My mother has never been the apologizing kind. But she told me she was glad I was out. That she'd heard I'd married well, and that she hopedwellmeant something different with the Orlovs than it did with the Savitsky’s. She asked me if I was happy, and the way she wrote it, with the question mark pressed so hard into the paper that I could feel the indent on the other side, told me she needed the answer to be yes.
I didn't write back immediately. I took the letter to Saoirse.
I don't know when that became a thing I do. Taking the hard parts to Aidan's mother and sitting at her kitchen table while she makes tea and listens. But it happened gradually, the way everything in this family happens. Not with force. With presence. Saoirse doesn't tell me what to do. She doesn't judge. She asks questions that make me think, and she touches my hand when the thinking gets heavy, and she has a way of sayingyou'll know when you're readythat sounds like permission instead of a platitude.
"She left you," Saoirse said, reading the letter.
I’d only just managed to nod. Not trusting my voice to carry the words.
"And you're angry about that."
Another nod. Shorter, sharper.
Saoirse set the letter down and looked at me over her tea. "You know, leaving isn't always cowardice. Sometimes it's the only option a woman has when every other door is locked." A pause. "That doesn't make it hurt less. But it might make it easier to write back."
I wrote back that night. A short letter. I told her I was starting school. I told her I was married to a man who lets me choose. I told her I was beginning to understand why she left, even if I wasn't ready to forgive her for not taking me with her.
She hasn't replied yet. But the door is open. And open doors are something I'm learning to live with.
I take one last look in the mirror. Smooth my hands down the front of my sweater, and when I catch myself doing it, I stop. I don't need to brace anymore. Especially not today.
The kitchen smells like coffee. Aidan is leaning against the counter with a mug in his hand, and when I walk in, he looks at me the way he always does. Like he still can't quite believe is real.
His knuckles have healed. Faint scars across the right hand that he'll carry permanently, and every time I see them, I think about the night he came home covered in someone else's blood because a man said my name like it was worth less than dirt.
Apparently at the council meeting, Aidan stood in front of the full assembly and invoked the old code, and Gregor Malekonosh sat there and turned the color of ash. By the end of it, a formal censure had been issued and Malekonosh had been stripped of his senior position. Then Aidan took his pound of flesh from Malenkosh and Linchenko.
Aidan didn't gloat.
That's the kind of man he is. Violence when it's necessary. Quiet when it's over.
"You ready?" he asks.
"I think so."
He sets his mug down and crosses to me. His hands settle on my waist and I lean into him automatically, my forehead against his chest, and I breathe him in. Coffee. Clean cotton. The faint scent of whatever soap he uses. The smell of home.
"You're going to be incredible," he says into my hair.
"You don't know that."
"I do. I've known it since the night you walked up to me at a bar in Prague and I realized you were the smartest person I'd ever met."
I pull back and look up at him. "I was manipulating you."
"You were brilliant at it. Imagine what you'll do when you're actually trying to help people instead."
A laugh escapes me. Real and warm and still slightly unfamiliar in its ease. "That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"I'll work on that."
He kisses me. Slow and certain, the way he does everything. His hand cups the back of my neck and his thumb traces the line of my jaw, and when he pulls away, his eyes are steady and sure and full of something that I've stopped being afraid to call love.
I'm not quite ready to say the word out loud yet. But I will be. It's somewhere in the space between us, growing in the same patient, inevitable way that everything between Aidan and me has grown. From a night in Prague to a name on a contract to a kitchen full of brochures to this. Standing in our home, about to walk out the door and into a life I chose.
"I should go," I say. "I don't want to be late."
"I'll drive you."
