Page 137 of Cruel Submission

I set her down, and she’s gone, racing toward Aleks and the disputed soccer ball.

I watch her go.

There was a time when I would rather have cut off my own hand than hold a child. The thought of it—a small body depending on me, trusting me, existing because of me—would shut me down so completely that the world narrowed to a pinhole. No children. That was the rule. Children meant something to lose. Something to destroy.

And then a registrar with a torn dress and no survival instincts walked into my life and dismantled every wall I’d built.

God knows I fought it. Fought her. Fought the pregnancy, the pull of it, the terrifying softness that crept in when she fell asleep against me. Fought Aleks—this baby who possibly wasn’t mine, who showed up at the worst possible moment, screaming and red-faced and motherless.

But I held him. When everyone was gone, and this tiny creature had no one, I held him. And something cracked open inside me.

Aleks didn’t fix me. Mirabel didn’t fix me. I’m not sure I’m fixed. But I’m here, and I’m present, and when my sons bite each other, I don’t think about how I might ruin them. I think about how to teach them to be better men than the one my father raised.

Most days, that’s enough.

“Arkady.” Mirabel’s voice pulls me back. She stands at the edge of the terrace, coffee cooling in her hands, watching me. Those brown eyes—deep and warm and too clever by half—read me the way she always has. She sees the shift, knows where my mind has gone.

She doesn’t crowd me. She never does. She just stands there, steady and solid and completely, infuriatingly herself, and waits for me to come back.

I cross the terrace and take the coffee from her hand. Set it on the stone railing. Then I cup her face, tilting it up, and press my lips to her forehead. She closes her eyes.

“I’m here,” I tell her.

“I know. Are you okay?”

“Around you… always.”

She smiles, her hand coming up to cover mine against her cheek. “Good.” She turns her face and kisses my palm. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t probe. Although she knows where my thoughts are. She always does.

The urn is still in the room at the end of the east wing. I go in once a week, sometimes more. But it’s different now. I don’t lock the door behind me. Sometimes Sara follows me in and sits on the sofa, legs swinging, asking questions about Uncle Mishka. I answer them honestly. I tell her he was clever and kind. I tell her he liked to draw ships. I tell her I miss him every day.

I don’t tell her how he died. One day I will. Perhaps.

“Uncle Mishka would have loved this,” Sara told me once, looking out at the garden through the studio window. She was four. She’d never met him, never seen his face outside of photographs, and still she spoke about him as if he existed nearby, watching.

I couldn’t speak for a full minute after that.

A crash from inside the house jolts me. Mirabel and I exchange a look.

“Yours,” she says instantly.

“Ours,” I correct, already moving. I find Arty in the kitchen, standing in a sea of pots and pans he’s pulled from the bottom cupboard. He looks up at me with absolute pride.

“Papa. I cook.”

“You cook,” I repeat, staring at the devastation. A saucepan rolls slowly toward my foot. “What are you cooking?”

“Cake.”

“With pans?”

“Da.”

I pick him up, settling him on my hip. He grabs my ear. I let him. The boy is obsessed with ears—mine, Mirabel’s, Adrik’s. We’ve stopped questioning it.

Adrik toddles in from the terrace, spots his twin elevated to the coveted hip position, and begins to wail. I pick him up, too. One on each side. Matching boys with matching lungs, dark hair, and my mouth. Mirabel’s nose. My mother’s eyes—gray-green and watchful—which gutted me the first time I noticed.

I carry them both back outside, where the evening is settling over Ashwater Heights. The garden sprawls below the terrace, the children scattered across it. Yanis is teaching Mika to kick the soccer ball properly. Mila sits cross-legged in the grass, picking daisies with disturbing intensity. Debra sways gently with Lena, singing something low and Russian that Yanis must have taught her—our mother’s lullaby, the one she used to sing before the world broke.