Irina is in the front row, holding Diana on her lap and feeding her something from a small container that I hope is food and not another flower. Denise sits beside her with David, who is wearing a tie for what I suspect is the first time in years and appears to be handling it with quiet dignity. Fedor stands at the back in a suit that makes him look like a bouncer at a wedding, which is essentially what he is. Arseny is beside him in a matching suit, but he’s paired it with a Hawaiian shirt as a nod to the past. Aurora grinned when she first saw it and smiles again at seeing it now.
Marisol appears at Aurora’s side and takes her arm. She’s wearing a green dress and an expression of aggressive composure that tells me she’s three seconds from crying again. “I have your bouquet, your vows, and a tissue. I’m prepared for all outcomes.”
“You’re going to be fine,” Aurora says to her.
“I’m going to be a disaster, but it’s going to be beautiful.” Marisol squeezes her arm. “Go marry him before I start crying again. That’ll just set you off too.”
The ceremony lasts twelve minutes.The officiant is a retired judge Irina found through connections I didn’t ask about, and he delivers the proceedings with a brevity I appreciate. Aurora and I wrote our own vows. The crowd seems moved, but my focus is all on her.
When that part is over, Aurora smiles, Marisol cries, and Viktor nods once from the back row, and the judge pronounces us married, and I kiss my wife for the first time with our children watching from their grandmother’s lap. We walk back down the aisle together as husband and wife.
After dinner, champagne, and a toast from Marisol that starts funny and ends with the entire table wiping their eyes, we get the twins settled for the night. Irina and Denise handle bedtime while I stand in the nursery doorway and watch Irina lower Diana into her crib while Denise rocks Braden in the chair beside the window, and I don’t check twice. I trust the people in my home, and the ease of that trust still surprises me.
Aurora takes my hand and pulls me down the hall to our room. She closes the door and leans against it as the house gets quiet around us.
“I need to tell you something.” I sit on the edge of the bed and look at her. “I’ve been carrying it for months, and I want to say it now because today feels like the right day.”
She comes to sit beside me. “I’m listening.”
“I don’t deserve what you gave me.” I hold her gaze because the words require it. “You gave me children. You gave me a reason to dismantle everything I inherited and build something that deserves to have your name on it. I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret any of it.”
She’s quiet for a moment before she puts her hand on my face and holds it there. “I stopped keeping score a long time ago, Adrian. You don’t owe me. We chose each other, and that’s how it works.”
I lean into her hand. The evening light comes through the window and catches our wedding rings, hers a simple band she picked out with Marisol, mine a match she insisted on. Down the hall, Braden fusses briefly before one of the grandmothers handles it, and the house settles again.
I think about the man I was the night I walked into Echelon. That man believed trust was a weakness and love was a variable to be managed. That man would have called a wife, two children, a legitimate business, and a home full of people he didn’t need to watch an impossible life. He…I…was wrong about everything that mattered.
“I will choose you every day for the rest of my life.”
Aurora smiles. “I know because you already do.”
I pull her close, and she leans into me as the sound of our children settling into sleep drifts down the hall. The story that started in a nightclub office, over a dead man’s body, ends with the woman who taught me the most powerful thing I would ever do was put down the weapon and pick the person standing beside me.
