I felt his hand tighten around mine.
"I cooked you dinner in my apartment a little while after that, and you asked if you could kiss me and I said no, and you heard it. Something in me moved the second you heard it. Months later I pulled you out of a fight in a seafood restaurant and I kissed you on the sidewalk to stop you from doing something terrible, and it was the first kiss I had ever given a man to stop him instead of start something."
I heard a small wet sound from Mikhail. I didn't look.
"For three months I sat alone in a kitchen waiting to hear that you were alive. I heard your name on a stranger's phone one afternoon and I went to my knees on the floor. Then I walked back into the house as a nanny for a child I hadn't met yet, and the man I loved didn't know my face. I learned what love is when it's stripped of every piece of evidence that it should still be there. It's still there. That's what it is. I loved you when you called yourself a name I didn't know. I loved you when you took me for ice cream and made fun of how I held the spoon. I loved you the night I brought soup to your room and you tried to remember me and I wouldn't let you push, because I trusted you to come back to me. You did."
I could feel tears on my cheeks. Sienna was going to bill me. I didn't care.
I looked at Daniil.
"I said I love you first at a birthday party in a kitchen full of people I love, and you said it back to me under the lights of a carnival with all of them standing in a half-circle, and I will never stop being the woman who got to hear it that way. I'm making you a promise. I'm not going to leave the room. Not for a fight. Not for fear. Not for three days of silence. Not for anybody. You come back, Daniil Sorokin, and I'll already be there. Every time."
I took a small breath.
"I love you. That's the simplest thing I've ever said, and the truest, and I'll be saying it to you for the rest of my life."
Alek let the silence sit for one good second. Then, gentle:
"By the authority granted to me, and by the witness of this family, I now pronounce you husband and wife."
He looked at Daniil. There was the faintest dry warmth in his voice when he added, "You may kiss your wife."
Daniil cupped my face in both hands like I might break, which was funny because I had never felt less breakable in my life, and he kissed me. It was soft. It was not long. It was sweet enough to bruise.
The room erupted.
Mikhail let out a sound that was definitely a sob and tried to pass it off as a cough. Ivan slow-clapped, which from Ivan was a standing ovation. Lily was already crying into Jade's shoulder. Sienna was crying into a tissue she had apparently brought just for herself. My grandmother sat very straight in her chair and pressed her fingertips to her mouth and did not stop smiling.
Rhea, who had been told very clearly that the petals were to be thrown before the bride walked down the aisle, and who had apparently been hoarding a strategic reserve in her basket theentire ceremony, stood up and flung two fistfuls of rose petals into the air and yelled, "NOW," and Beom-Beom got a face full of them.
I laughed out loud, with tears still on my face, and Daniil pulled me into him and pressed his forehead to mine and laughed too, quiet, low in his chest. I felt his ring settle against my finger as his hand closed around mine.
The reception was in the long gallery off the chapel, with the doors thrown open between the rooms so that the candles and the flowers carried through. They had set up one long table that ran the length of the gallery, white cloth, sprigs of greenery, low candles. The string trio had picked up a fourth, a cellist, and the four of them had moved with us and tucked themselves into the corner like they belonged there.
The food was the kind where you know somebody loved every plate. Small bowls of japchae and a quiet pile of mandu my grandmother had supervised the morning before. Beef and bread that smelled like Daniil's childhood, by his face when it came past. At the far end of the table sat two cakes, side by side, both small, both perfect. A neat tower of glossy white tteok stacked into a small shape on a black lacquer plate. Beside it a tall honey-gold medovik, layered thin as paper, dusted with crushed walnut at the rim. Both families on a table. I did not get over that for a while.
Daniil's hand stayed at the small of my back as he walked me to my seat. He pulled the chair out for me. He bent and kissed the top of my head before he sat.
Mikhail stood up before the soup had even cooled.
"Speech," he announced. "Speech speech speech. Sit down, Ivan, this is me."
"I was sitting," Ivan said.
"Sit harder."
He held a glass aloft.
"My brother," he said, and his voice cracked on it, and he gave the whole room a moment to laugh at him about it. "My brother, Daniil Sorokin, who, when we threw a small child's birthday party in this very compound, insisted on wearing a small pink kiddie hat shaped like a crown. With the elastic. Under the chin. I have photographs."
"Mikhail," Daniil said.
"I have so many photographs."
"Mikhail."
"My brother, who, when he decided he was going to propose to this woman, was unable, despite being feared in twelve countries, to plan a single proposal. We had to do it for him. We had to stage an intervention. Three Bratva enforcers in a kitchen at midnight planning a proposal like teenage girls. Ivan, tell them how many times I cried."
