Page 133 of Cruel Submission

“Mrs. Laurov,” he says.

“Don’t start.”

“Too late.”

Behind us, the ocean breeze catches the last of the ceremony’s closing words and carries them out across the water, mixing our “I do’s” with salt air and the sound of waves and the distant shriek of a gull that couldn’t care less about human love stories. The sky is wide and cloudless and absurdly cinematic, the sort of backdrop that exists specifically so that people getting married on beaches can look at each other and think: we earned this.

We earned this.

* * *

The garden party is Debra’s doing. All of it—the fairy lights strung between the palms, the long tables draped in white cloth, the bar set up beneath a canvas canopy that ripples in the breeze. She spent three weeks planning it from her laptop at the kitchen table in Ashwater Heights, color-coding spreadsheets and arguing with florists over the phone while Yanis sat beside her and pretended he had opinions about centerpieces.

It’s beautiful. It’s also dual-purpose, because today isn’t just our wedding reception—it’s Debra and Yanis’s engagement party. They announced it over dinner, with the quiet care that defines everything about the way Yanis loves my sister.

No ring at first. She’d told him she wasn’t ready for one. So instead, he’d given her a key. A skeleton key on a fine silver chain, the sort that opens nothing and means everything. She wears it against her collarbone now, the metal warming against her skin.

The ring came later. Two weeks afterward, she chose it herself—a thin band of rose gold with a single blue sapphire. She put it on her own finger, at her own pace, in her own time. Yanis watched her do it without speaking, without rushing, without reaching for her hand to do it for her. When she held it up for us to see, he kissed the ring and then her palm and then her wrist, and I totally choked up.

Now they stand together near the bar, receiving congratulations from guests who’ve just watched Arkady and me get married and are still riding the emotional high. I get a lump in my throat when I see how my sister has gradually allowed this man to get close. His hand is on the small of her back now, physical contact that she would have struggled with before.

Dad sees it too. And he’s smiling. He looks good. Not the way he looked before the cancer—that version of Dad, robust and invincible, is gone, replaced by something leaner and more weathered. But his color is back. His appetite is back. The hollows beneath his cheekbones have softened with the weight he’s been steadily regaining since Debra walked into his hospital room.

He was discharged a month later. Not because the cancer disappeared—though it retreated, stubbornly, grudgingly, as if even the disease recognized that Peter McLeod had unfinished business. But because his vitals stabilized. His white cell count climbed. His appetite returned with a vengeance that had the hospital kitchen sending up double portions and the oncologist making cautiously optimistic noises for the first time in a year.

Joy, it turns out, is miraculous medicine.

Now he sits in his chair with a glass of sparkling water and a plate of canapés, and watches his family with the contentment of a man who’s decided that the universe owes him this, and he intends to collect.

Aleks crawls past him.

This is becoming a recurring feature of the afternoon—Aleks exploring the garden party on all fours. He’s ten months old, sturdy as a small boulder, with Arkady’s ice-pale eyes and a mop of dark hair.

Right now, he’s making his way across the freshly cut grass toward the dessert table.

“Your son,” Arkady murmurs against my ear, appearing beside me with two glasses of champagne, one of which he hands to me, “is attempting to take the cake.”

“Your son,” I correct, taking the glass, “has inherited your gift for strategic planning.”

“He’s heading for the profiteroles.”

“Like I said. Strategic genius.”

Arkady watches him for a moment, that absorbed, watchful attention he gives the children. It’s hard to believe he once swore he’d never have them.

I can’t help staring at him. He’s always gorgeous, but when he’s like this, in full “Dad” mode, he’s totally irresistible.

He catches my look. “What?”

“Nothing.” I sip my champagne. “Just admiring the view.”

“Mm.” His arm tightens around me, pulling me flush against his side. His mouth grazes the spot below my ear, and I shiver. “Careful,” he says, and his voice is low enough to be just for me, rough enough to carry a promise that has nothing to do with this garden party and everything to do with later. “People will think you like me.”

“Can’t have that. It would ruin my reputation as the woman who married the most impossible man in New York.”

“I’m not impossible.”

“You reorganized the hotel minibar by expiration date last night.”