“Jared.” His tone was extremely patient. “We all knew about that night. Dottie is not subtle.”
I looked back across the room. Raia was saying something and Polina was listening with the careful attention she brought to things that mattered, and something in her expression had the quality of a woman receiving something she hadn’t known she needed. An outsider finding an inside. A person who had spent her whole life managing her own solitude being told, without words, that the managing was optional now.
I felt it from across the room.
Raia caught my eye over Polina’s shoulder and gave me a look that communicated, with the efficiency of a woman who hadbeen in this world long enough to speak its language fluently, that she approved. Entirely. Without reservation.
I looked away before Polina could turn and catch me watching.
“The thing with Declan,” Erik said quietly. “The Interpol thing.”
“Yes.”
“He’s not angry.”
“He told me.”
“He was worried,” Erik said. “That’s different from angry. We were all. There was a period where the traveling and the disappearances and the—“ he paused. “We thought you might be in trouble. The kind you wouldn’t ask for help with.”
I looked at him. The look on his face, the relief underneath the calm, the thing that had been sitting there since I’d walked through the door tonight and he’d looked at me the way he looked at people he was glad to see.
“I should have told you,” I said.
“You should have,” he agreed. “You didn’t. That’s done.” He glanced at me sideways. “Don’t do it again.”
“The spying or the not telling?”
“The not telling.” He looked across the room with the expression of a man who had built something and was satisfied with it. “The spying you can keep. It explains a great deal.”
Across the room, Noah had abandoned the billiards competition and was now in the kitchen doorway saying something to Shelby that made her throw a sofa cushion at him with the accuracy of someone who had done it many times. Colin caught it without looking up from his phone. Lincoln shook his head. Zara laughed.
My family being themselves in my friend’s home on a Friday evening, loud and warm and entirely unremarkable, doing the thing that I had watched for years from a careful andprofessional distance and had told myself, with considerable conviction, that I did not need.
I had been so thoroughly wrong about that.
Polina separated from Raia and moved through the room toward me with the ease of a woman who had stopped navigating and started simply moving, and I watched her come and felt the familiar sensation rise in my chest, the one I’d been carrying since the night in the aftercare room at Asgard when it had finally found its proper name.
Peace.
Not the absence of complexity. The world was still complicated, the trial was still coming, the Barnes interview was next week and she was nervous about it in the controlled way she was nervous about things, which meant she wasn’t sleeping quite enough and was reading curatorial theory at 11 PM and pretending she wasn’t. Not the resolution of everything difficult. Just… this. Her crossing a room toward me in a place I loved, with people I loved, having clearly had a conversation that had given her something she needed.
Peace. The feeling of a man who has come home to something he didn’t know he was missing and found it exactly where he left it, which was everywhere he’d been the whole time.
She reached me. Looked up with those clear eyes. Words weren’t needed as her expression said everything.
In a word—home. I wrapped my arms around her, resting my chin gently on her crown.
Across the room, Declan caught my eye.
He was standing with Marissa, her shoulder against his, both of them holding drinks and occupying the easy proximity of people who had stopped pretending the distance was necessary. He looked at me with the steady gaze of a man who had been patient for a long time about many things and was making no announcements tonight but was also not hiding anything.
I gave him a nod. He returned it.
Marissa said something to him without looking away from the room, her lips barely moving, and something shifted in his expression, not quite a smile, the familiar thing that happened to his face when she said something that had the right impact, and he looked down at her briefly with the look of a man who had run out of reasons to keep the distance and had recently stopped trying.
I filed it under not my business until it becomes my business and turned back to Polina.
“Are you alright?” I asked. “With all of this. The noise and the—“
