Page 135 of Cruel Submission

“Wonderful,” he says, and I know that he means it. “Better than wonderful. My girls are here. My grandbabies are here. That terrifying young man you married just gave a speech that made me cry, and I’m going to pretend it was allergies.”

“It was a good speech.”

“It was a brilliant speech, and I hate that, because I want to dislike him and he keeps making it difficult.” He reaches for my hand. “Your mother would have loved today, Mirabel.”

The words settle into me gently. Not the old ache but something warmer. Something that holds the sadness without being defined by it.

“She would have loved Debra’s dress,” I say. “And she definitely would have cried more than you.”

“Impossible. I’ve been crying for three hours. I’m dehydrated.”

I laugh, and he laughs, and Sara stirs in her carrier, making the small, disgruntled sound she makes when the world dares to intrude while she’s sleeping.

“She’s got your temperament,” Dad says, peering at his granddaughter. “Easily annoyed. Suspicious of joy.”

“I am not suspicious of joy.”

“You interrogated a florist this morning about whether the peonies were ethically sourced.”

“That’s not suspicion, that’s due diligence.”

He shakes his head, still smiling, and pulls me closer with his arm around my shoulders. I lean against him. He smells like soap and sunscreen and the warmth that has always meant home to me—before Ashwater Heights, before Arkady, before any of it.

“Are you happy, Mira?” he asks. “Really happy? Not just performing it for the guests and the Instagram photos?”

I look out at the garden. Arkady is standing with Stefan and Yanis. Even at rest, they carry themselves like men for whom relaxation is a luxury and vigilance is a reflex.

But Arkady’s collar is open, and his feet are still bare. When Aleks crawls into his path, he scoops his son up with one arm without breaking stride in the conversation, settling the boy against his hip with the ease of a man who’s had months to learn that fatherhood isn’t a threat.

Debra is dancing. She’s swaying alone and barefoot on the grass to a song drifting from the speakers, her eyes half-closed, her body moving with a looseness she’s fought hard to reclaim.

Yanis is watching her. He’s got a glass in one hand and the other in his trouser pocket, not interrupting. Just watching with the unhurried patience of a man who understands that some dances are private, and that the greatest act of love is sometimes simply bearing witness.

I look at my father. “Yeah, Dad,” I say. “I’m happy.”

He kisses the top of my head. Holds me there for a moment. And in the warm, fading light of the garden, with the sound of the ocean and the laughter of the people I love and the small, muffled noises of the four-month-old in the carrier beside us, I let myself believe it completely.

Not because the shadows are gone. They never will be. Arkady still checks the chamber of every gun he touches, twice, every time. Debra still sleeps with the light on. Yanis still scans every room he enters for threats. And I still reach for my sister in the middle of the night, some old reflex, some echo of years spent believing she was dead, needing to know she’s okay.

But the shadows don’t own us anymore.

And tomorrow, when we wake up with sand in our sheets and children who don’t care about sleep schedules and the complicated, imperfect love of two brothers who chose a different path than the one they were born to—tomorrow, we begin again.

Not perfectly. Not without scars.

But ours.

Epilogue

Arkady

Five years later.

The soccer ball rockets past my left ear and smacks into the rose bushes.

A shower of pink petals rains down, and somewhere behind me, Mirabel groans.

“Aleks! The roses!”