"Same thing." He turns me to face him. "I wanted to bring you back to the exact spot on the exact day. A full circle. Like the one I always wanted but never thought I'd get."
I'm crying. I cry at everything now. I've fully given up on being a person who doesn't cry. "You're an idiot," I manage to sniffle out.
He grins. He knows exactly what I mean. "What kind of idiot?" he asks, playing along.
I punch him in the chest. "The bravest, stupidest one I've ever met."
Inside, it's everything the old one was and more. A new moose head has found its home over the fireplace, which makes me shudder in horror. The rest of it is just like I remember, too: a plaid couch, a cozy kitchen, and open shelves.
Thank God, though, there's not one can of beans in sight.
The bed in the bedroom is huge, covered in a massive quilt. On the nightstand, propped up, is the photograph of Afon, Gervasii, Yelena, standing in front of a restaurant a lifetime ago. The crease still runs down the middle. But it's in a frame now, behind glass, sitting out where anyone can see it.
I run my finger along the edge. "You framed it."
He joins me and wraps me up from behind. "I figured you wouldn't mind."
"I don't," I say. And I mean it. There's room in this house for Yelena. There's room in him for her. Loving someone who's gone doesn't take anything away from loving someone who's here.
Afon has a whole heart. There's enough of it for both of us.
We light a fire that night.
Afon builds it, and within minutes, the whole front room is glowing orange and warm. The wind is picking up as the sun sets, rattling the windows, and a coyote is howling in the distance. Wolf lifts his head off the rug and growls deep in his chest, then decides it's not worth the effort and goes back to sleep.
"It's Halloween," I say, curled into Afon's side on the couch. "We should be doing something spooky."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Tell a scary story."
He ponders. Then, in his gravelly voice, he says, "Once upon a time, a city girl with no survival skills hiked into the mountains by herself with a dead phone and one granola bar."
I smack his chest. "That's not scary, that's a documentary."
"It's the scariest story I know," he says. "I lived it. I have nightmares."
"Oh, shut up, you do not."
"I do," he swears. "I dream about you wandering into the woods with no coat and freezing to death before I find you." He says it lightly, but his arm tightens around me when he does. "That one's worse than the old ones. The old ones I'm used to."
I tilt my head up to look at him. The firelight does something to his face, softens it, fills in the hard lines. "You don't have to have that dream," I tell him. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"I know that." He brushes my hair back from my face, and his thumb paints my cheekbone, slow. "Doesn't stop the dreams. But it makes them easier to wake up from."
I kiss him then, because I can't not, and it goes the way these things go now, slow at first and then less slow, and then he's pulling me into his lap and I'm tugging at the hem of his sweater, and we end up naked on the rug in front of the fire because the couch is too far away and the bed is even farther.
He kisses the scar on my chin where the rock got me, then my throat, my collarbone, the gold ring on my finger. He saysI love youabout forty times, like he's still making up for the twenty years he spent saying nothing to anyone.
And when he finally moves into me, the fire warm on one side of us and his body warm on the other, he says, "Look at me," and Ido, and his eyes aren't concrete, they're open, they're his, they're full of everything.
"I love you, Caroline Satyrin," he says.
"I love you, too, my stupid, brave idiot," I tell him, and he laughs, even now, even like this, and then neither of us is laughing anymore.
I wake up in the new bed wearing his flannel.
I don't even remember putting it on. I remember the fire dying down and Afon carrying me to bed because my legs didn't work, and then I remember nothing because I slept like the dead, which is what happens when you marry a man who keeps you safe and warm and the only thing killing you anymore is a vegetable garden that needs weeding.
