Her throat moves. I watch her swallow. I watch her hands tighten on the sheet.
"You're talking about children," she says.
"I'm talking about a life. Marriage, children, a home. A family that's real, that's mine, that I built with someone I chose." I pause. "Someone who chose me back."
"Nick, we've known each other for less than two weeks."
"I know."
"Two weeks. And most of those days I was either unconscious or you were recovering from a concussion."
"I know that, too."
She laughs. The same brittle sound from the alley behind the clinic, the one that's trying to keep something else at bay. "And you're sitting here telling me about marriage and heirs like you're reading terms and conditions."
"I'm sitting here telling you the truth, because you told me you'd rather have the truth than comfort, and I believed you." I keep my voice level. "I'm not proposing to you tonight, Sadie. I'm telling you where this road goes if you walk it with me. I'm telling you so you can decide with your eyes open, because you deserve that. You've had a man who hid who he was from you. I'm not going to be the same."
The laugh dies. She's quiet for a long time.
"What about my work?" she asks.
"What about it?"
"I'm a medical assistant, Nick. I walk fourteen blocks to a clinic and I take people's blood pressure and I clean wounds and I hand Dr. Mehta charts. That's my life. That's the thing I chose after everything else fell apart, and it matters to me."
"Then keep it."
She looks at me like she's waiting for the catch.
"I'm serious. Keep the clinic. Keep Dr. Mehta. Keep the work." I hold her gaze. "Or don't. Go back to school. Finish the nursing degree you started before your mother got sick. Go further. Be a doctor, if that's what you want. Your drive and ambition is one of the things I love most about you."
Her mouth opens. Closes.
"You could do anything, Sadie. That's what I'm telling you. Beside me, there is no ceiling. Not financial, not professional,not personal. You want to work, you work. You want to study, you study. You want to open your own clinic in a neighborhood that needs one, I'll buy the building and you'll run it and I'll never set foot in it unless you invite me. Your life doesn't shrink because you're with me. It gets bigger. That's the deal."
Her eyes are bright. I watch her blink twice, hard, the way she does when she's refusing to cry.
"And the other part?" she says. "The heirs part. You're asking a Type 1 diabetic to have children. You understand what that means medically."
"I understand it means high-risk pregnancies. I understand it means specialists and monitoring and a level of care that most women don't need. Mikhail has already told me what it would involve, because I asked him, because I did my research before bringing this to you."
"You asked your doctor about my ability to have children before you asked me?"
She stares at me. I watch the war on her face, outrage and something else, something that looks close to relief, as if part of her is glad someone thought about it before she had to.
"Please don’t feel violated. I had to know, because I can’t bear the thought of not being with you and if that meant no kids, then so be it. But Mikhail says it's manageable," I say. "With the right team, the right monitoring, the right care. He's delivered high-risk pregnancies before. He delivered me, for that matter, and my mother had complications of her own." I pause. "But if you tell me you don't want children, I'll hear you. I'll figure it out. The men will accept what I tell them to accept, because that's what it means to sit in the chair."
"And if I say I do want them? Eventually?"
"Then eventually, we'll have them. On your timeline. When your body is ready and your mind is ready and you've had enough time to decide that this life is something you're choosing freely."
She pulls her knees up to her chest. The sheet bunches around her. She rests her chin on her knees and looks at me sideways, and in the dim light she looks exactly like the woman I found in the back of my sedan, calm and present and entirely herself.
"You're asking me to marry a man who runs a criminal empire," she says. "To have his children. To build a life inside a world I don't understand, with a target on my back that I didn't ask for, next to a man who told me on our first date that he's a monster."
"You think that was a date?" I ask, teasing.
She rolls her eyes. "And in exchange, I get what? Safety? Money? A building with my name on it?"
