Page 61 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

“We were always going to be outnumbered.” He takes the card and reads it again, then looks at me with a grin he doesn’t try to hide. “God help us. They’ll gang up on us within a month.”

“They’ll gang up on you. They’ll adore me but gang up on you because they’ll soon realize you’re a soft touch.”

“They probably will.” He’s grinning without trying to hide it now. “We’ll need three names. We can’t keep calling them One, Two, and Three.”

“We have time.” I’m laughing. “We have so much time. That’s the part I can’t get used to, that there’s time for any of this.”

He gets quiet then, like he’s deciding something, and he reaches into his pocket.

I know what it is before I see it. Some part of me has known since the pancakes.

“I’ve had this since before the island,” he says, and sets a small box on the table between the envelope and the cold tea. “I kept waiting for a perfect moment untouched by danger, and then I understood perfection wasn’t the point. This kitchen is enough. You’re here, and I’m here, and this is the real version of our life.”

He opens the box. The ring inside is nothing like the jewelry I stole from his estate. It isn’t showy. A single stone catches the morning light, chosen for what the ring means rather than what the stone costs.

“You walked into my house with a certificate claiming you were my wife,” he says. “It was the best forgery I’ve ever seen, even though it was a lie. Somewhere in the last two months, I stopped wanting to expose it and started wanting to make it true. I’m asking because you saw every part of me and loved me anyway. We survived everything that tried to separate us, and I don’t want another day built around pretending you’re temporary. Will you marry me for real this time?”

I’ve spent my whole life keeping a route out of every room. I built my life around never needing anyone, around the certainty that the second I let myself want something, it would be taken. Now here is this man, in a kitchen that smells like burnt pancakes, offering everything I taught myself never to reach for.

There was never any question about my answer. “Yes, I’ll marry you for real. You should put it on before I forge one myself.”

He laughs and fumbles once as he slides the ring onto my finger. I cup his face in both hands and kiss him. Flour from his cuff streaks my cheek, and I laugh against his mouth while he wipes it away without letting go of my hand.

28

NIKITA

Piper is holding court by the terrace doors with one hand supporting the full weight of her stomach, and I can’t stop looking at her.

About five months have passed. A specialist ultrasound later showed two boys and a girl. We waited this long on purpose. Mila calls the shower late, but by our standards it’s the right time. Piper wouldn’t hang the nursery curtains until the last illegal operations stopped, and I understood why. Neither of us wanted to build a room we might have to abandon. The operations are gone now. Only two final ownership transfers remain, and the house my mother once filled with music is full of people again. None of them is here because they fear me. Piper is almost thirty-five weeks along with triplets, which Mila says is a small miracle of stubbornness, since many triplet pregnancies deliver around thirty-four weeks, and the cesarean to bring them out is scheduled for the end of the week.

I stand at the edge of it with a glass and let myself savor the moment.

Piper catches me watching and lifts an eyebrow, which in the shorthand we’ve built means you’re brooding at your own party. I lift my glass half an inch, which means I’m allowed, it’s my house, and she almost laughs before she turns back to the woman she’s talking to.

“…the restoration piece is the part I keep getting stuck on,” Piper is telling the foundation’s new program director when I drift closely enough to hear. “Returning a stolen piece is clean when you can find the family. Half the time you can’t, so we’re funding conservation training instead, putting the money where the next generation of people who protect this work will come from.” She sets a hand on her lower back. “Two scholarship cohorts are committed for the fall, one in provenance research and one in restoration.”

She built that. My mother’s foundation used to launder paintings. My wife-to-be turned it into the thing its letterhead always claimed to be and runs it like she was born to the work.

“You’re staring again,” she says without turning around.

“I’m admiring the program director.”

“The program director is sixty and married.” She finally turns, and there’s the ghost of the grin she saves for me.

“I’m admiring her boss.”

Callum finds me by the drinks table, which he approaches carefully, still not sure I won’t have him thrown out of rooms.

“The apprenticeship’s good,” he says, before I ask, because his sister taught him to get ahead of the question. “The fabrication shop, the one that does the restoration mounts and the crating. I’m learning the joinery side. It’s a real trade, not a favor.” He says the last part firmly, watching me to see if I’ll correct him.

“It isn’t a favor.” I hand him a soda, because he’s twenty-three and driving his mother home tonight. “You passed the shop’s skills test. The shop doesn’t take anyone it would have to carry, and I told the managers not to make an exception for family.” I watch the disbelief work across his face, the same disbelief his sister wore for the first month in my house, when every good thing looked like a trap with better bait. “You built the mounts for the Kandinsky restoration last month. I saw the invoice. Nobody signs off on work like that as a favor. You’re there because you’re good with your hands, which I understand runs in your family.”

Callum lowers his shoulders half an inch. He’s spent his life being the one Piper protected, the debt she carried, and one more reason she never believed she could stop watching the exits. Watching him earn a thing on his own is one of the quieter pleasures of the last six months, but I don’t tell him that, because he’d hate it.

“She worries you’re managing me,” he says.

“She worries about everything. It’s why she’s still alive.” I clink my glass against his soda. “You’re not being managed. You’re being employed. There’s a difference, and your paychecks come from a company that keeps audited books now, so it’s an honest one.”