When it's all over, we're intertwined in a way that teams of wild horses couldn't even begin to separate. I press my lips to his chest, over the scar, over the swallow with the key in its beak that brought me up the whole mountain.
"Stupid, brave idiots," I murmur. "Both of us."
"All three of us," he corrects. Down the hall, Wolf is snoring loud enough to hear through the door. "All three of us."
He laughs, and so do I, and that giggle in the dark is the most perfect thing I've ever been a part of. I get to love this wild mountain man, this protector, this lost soul who swore he'd used up his one good year and believed in his heart of hearts that no one gets happily ever after twice.
But he loves me now. And he finally, finally believes we'll make it.
39
AFON
SIX MONTHS LATER
Café Volna sits on a corner in Brighton Beach, half a block from the boardwalk. It hasn't changed in thirty years. Same chipped tile floor. Same old men playing cards in the back. Same smell of black tea and fried dough and the ocean leaking in every time the door opens.
I used to come here with Gervasii. A lifetime ago. Now, I come here with his son.
Matvei sits across from me in the window booth, a cup of coffee going cold in front of him. He looks good. The bruises healed months ago. The limp is gone. He's back to being the slick lawyer who can talk his way out of anything, dark suit, dark hair, an easy way about him that he didn't get from me or his father.
He got that from his mother, maybe. I don't remember her well enough to say.
"You're not drinking your coffee," I tell him.
He turns up his nose. "That's because it takes like ass."
"You've gone soft," I say. "Living in the city, drinking your fancy foam drinks."
He grins. "And you've gone what? Domestic? I heard you have a vegetable garden now."
"Caroline has a vegetable garden," I correct with all the seriousness in the world. "I merely dig the holes she tells me to dig."
Matvei laughs. I don't take that sound for granted. For a long time after his father died, the kid didn't laugh at all. He just got quiet and hard and put as many miles between himself and this life as he could.
Now, he's back, and he laughs, and his wife is friends with my wife, and we can sit in a cafe by the ocean drinking bad coffee like two normal men.
I think about that more than I should. How strange it is. How good.
"So," he says. "Six months since you tied the knot. How's married life treating you, old man?"
I turn the cup in my hands and look at the ring on my finger. Plain gold, simple. It still feels new on my finger, though it's been there half a year. I keep waiting for it to feel like the old one did, worn into the skin, a part of me. It doesn't yet. Maybe it never will. Maybe that's the point.
"It's good," I say.
"That's it? Good?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something with a littleoomphin it. You're a married man now. You're supposed to have feelings."
I look out the window. It's bright and sunny out, high summer, seagulls wheeling in the thermal drafts. We're a world away from that snowy, ashy heap in the Catskills I thought I'd call home for the rest of my life. And we're even farther from that desolate stretch of county road outside Saratoga Springs.
In some ways, I'm glad that Reznik resurfaced. I got the closure I needed.It was me. I killed her.I waited twenty years to hear it. And when I finally did, it didn't fix anything, but it didendsomething.
The not-knowing. The wondering.
Reznik is dead now. Lukas took care of that. I didn't watch and I don't ask. Unusual for me, but then again, I'm doing lots of uncharacteristic things these days.
