“I know. I just needed to hear you say it.”
“The operation funds this family. This family gives the operation a reason beyond profit.” I look at him. “Those things don’t cancel each other out. They hold each other up.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he nods once. “Alright.”
“Alright?”
“Alright, I believe you.”
He leaves.
I sit in the study for a while after he’s gone. Review the week’s shipping reports. Sign off on the two contracts Pavel has left on my desk. Routine work that feels different now than it did a year ago, not lighter exactly, but more grounded. Like it has somewhere to go beyond itself.
At ten o’clock I go upstairs.
The twins are asleep. I check both rooms the way I do every night. Mila’s rabbit is in place. Alexei’s train car on the nightstand. Doors open four inches exactly.
Anna is in our bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dim light, still awake, hands folded in her lap. She looks up when I walk in.
“You said tonight,” she says.
I close the door. Cross the room and stand in front of her.
“Marry me,” I say. “Properly. Whatever that looks like to you. Whoever you want there, whatever you want to say. No contracts. No arrangements. No transactions.” I look at her. “Just you deciding you want this. Me. Them. All of it.”
She looks up at me for a long moment.
Outside the room, the house is quiet. My children are sleeping. Maxim drove home an hour ago. Viktor is three weeks from being cleared to return to work. The Malikov network is eleven days gone.
“Yes,” Anna says.
Just that. No conditions. No qualifications. Just yes.
I take her face in my hands and kiss her, and she reaches up and holds my wrists and kisses me back, and outside the window, the estate grounds are dark and quiet and entirely ours.
In the morning, Mila finds us at breakfast and announces that she wants to wear purple to the wedding.
We haven’t told them yet.
Anna looks at me across the kitchen table. I look back at her.
“How did you know there was going to be a wedding?” Anna asks her.
Mila picks up a piece of toast and shrugs with the confidence of a child who considers herself very well informed. “Alexei heard you say yes last night.”
Alexei, across the table, does not look up from his cereal. “I wasn’t listening on purpose.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“Getting water.” He lines up his spoon beside his bowl with precise spacing. “The door wasn’t fully closed.”
Anna puts her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders are shaking.
I reach across the table and steal a piece of her toast. “Purple it is,” I tell Mila.
She beams.
And just like that, without ceremony or announcement, our family has its first wedding to plan.
