I lost it.
I sat there at the long white table with my husband's hand on my thigh under the cloth and tears coming off my face in front of every single person who mattered to me, and I did not try to hide a single one of them. Daniil pulled me into him and pressed his mouth to my temple and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say. Halmoni, beside me, reached over and put her small dry hand on top of mine and squeezed once.
Mom. She had said it. On a small juice glass, on a small chair, in front of everybody. Mom.
Lily was full-on weeping into a napkin. Sienna had given up on her own face and was simply leaking quietly into her wine. Mikhail had a fist over his mouth. Even Ivan, who I had once watched count gunshots like a man counting laundry, had pressed a thumb to the inner corner of his own eye.
The string quartet shifted into something soft.
Daniil stood and held out his hand. I took it. He walked me out onto the small cleared space at the head of the gallery and pulled me into him for our first dance.
He kept it slow. He kept it close. My belly was a small soft round between us, and he settled his hand low on my back like he was holding both of us in place, and I tucked my cheek into the place where his collarbone meets his shoulder. He was humming. He did not know he was humming. The quartet had picked up some old slow song I didn't recognize, and he was humming along anyway, low in his chest, like he had heard it once, in a life he could not remember, and his body remembered it for him.
"My husband," I said, into his shirt.
"My wife," he said, into my hair.
We turned. We turned again. I could feel everybody watching and I did not care.
When the song ended he kissed my forehead, and then, before I could miss him, he was walking past me to where Rhea was sitting on the edge of her chair like a small white rocket about to fire.
"Princess," he said, and bowed.
"Daddy."
He scooped her up. Beom-Beom went into the middle of them, between his chest and hers. He danced with her slow and exaggerated, the way you dance with a small child, big swooping turns that made her braid swing out and her dress flare. Her face was pressed into his neck and she was laughing.
I sat down in the chair he had pulled out for me, and Halmoni's hand slipped right back into mine.
"That is a good man," she said, quiet, watching him.
"I know."
"Keep him."
"I will."
The brothers had gathered at the corner of the table, all of them slightly drunk by now, all of them in suits, all of them with their wives somewhere nearby keeping an eye on them.
"He is humming," Mikhail said, scandalized.
"He is humming," Ivan confirmed.
"He hummed twice."
"He is still humming."
"I have known him my entire life and I have never heard him hum."
Alek, halfway through a glass of wine, said calmly, "He hums in the car."
"Excuse me?"
"In the car. He thinks no one notices."
"You have been holding out on us for twenty years."
"Yes."
