The feel of her coming undone—open, trusting, completely mine in this moment—snaps my control.
I bury myself deep. Groan low against her shoulder. Pulse inside her. Hot. Thick. Endless. My arms wrap around her. Holding her close while we ride the aftershocks together.
We stay joined. Breathing hard. Foreheads touching. My hand strokes down her side. Gentle. Soothing. Her fingers trace lazy patterns across my back.
I hold her afterward and neither of us speaks for a long time.
Her breathing slows. Her hand rests flat against my chest. I keep my arms around her and roll us over so she’s resting on top of me. I look at the ceiling and think about a warehouse floor and azip tie and the way she angled her body between my children and that door.
“I can’t lose you,” I tell her. “After everything. I can’t.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
Then she tilts her head up and looks at me. “You’re not going to.”
I hold her tighter.
In the morning, small fists knock on the bedroom door at half past six. Alexei’s voice through the wood. “Papa. Mama. Are you in there?”
Anna lifts her head from my chest. Looks at the door and then at me.
The knock comes again, louder. Then Mila’s voice joining her brother’s. “We’re hungry. Elena said to ask you.”
Anna’s mouth curves. The first real smile I’ve seen on her face in weeks. “We should probably open that door,” she says.
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves for another five seconds.
Then she laughs and gets up to let them in.
40
ANNA
My father takeshis first steps on a Thursday.
Three of them. From the bed to the window, slow and careful, my mother on one side and a physiotherapist on the other. He stops at the window and looks out at the estate grounds for a long moment, at the garden and the lawn and the security team moving in their rotation, and then he turns around and walks back.
When he sits down on the edge of the bed, he looks exhausted and quietly triumphant in equal measure.
My mother cries. She turns away so he won’t see, but he sees anyway and reaches out and takes her hand without saying anything.
I watch from the doorway and feel something loosen in my chest that has been wound tight since a warehouse floor a week ago.
The twins have been visiting him every afternoon. Mila brings flowers from the garden, different ones each day, arranged in whatever jam jar she can find. Alexei brings his train cars and lines them up on my father’s windowsill in precise rows that myfather studies with the seriousness they deserve. They’ve turned his recovery room into something that looks more like a very small, very loved version of home, and my father, who has never been a demonstrative man, lets them do it without a word of protest.
Luca doesn’t come inside. He gives us that. But he’s always there when we come out, leaning against the wall with his phone and whatever coffee someone has brought him, and the twins always find him immediately and always have approximately forty things to tell him about the visit.
I watch him listen to them. Really listen. Crouching down to Mila’s level while she describes the flowers she picked. Nodding seriously while Alexei explains the structural significance of where he placed each train car on the windowsill.
The walls I spent four months building are gone, and I don’t know what to do with the space they’ve left behind.
On the Friday of the second week, Luca knocks on my bedroom door in the morning while the twins are at breakfast with Elena. “Can you come to my study when you have a moment?” he asks.
“Now is fine.”
He looks at me. “You don’t have to brace yourself. It’s not bad news.”
