Page 65 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

She hands him back to the nurse exactly right when he tires, and before she goes, she stops beside my chair, just as she stopped in a doorway a lifetime ago when I was a forger she’d decided to despise.

“You did well,” Vera says. It’s the first uncomplicated praise Vera has ever given me. We both know it, though neither of us says so.

Angelina takes forty photographs through the NICU glass and starts an argument with Callum on the other side of it.

“The middle one is you,” she says to Nikita, holding her phone up to the incubator to compare. “You can see the scowl already. That’s your exact face when a spreadsheet doesn’t balance.”

“They all look like Nikita,” Callum says, and there’s something in how he says it, easy and certain, my brother standing at a NICU window claiming an uncle’s kids like he’s always belonged in the room. “Poor things.”

“The girl looks like Piper,” Angelina says. “She’s furious about the mask. That’s all Piper.”

I let them argue over my children’s faces through a pane of glass, my brother and Nikita’s sister. I think about how strange and enormous it is that these three will grow up with this, with people who fight over which of them looks like whom, with a family big enough to have sides.

Celine comes last, and she doesn’t ask for anything.

That surprises me. My whole life, my mother has walked into rooms needing something. Now she sits down in the chair beside my bed and just holds the photo Angelina printed for her, three small faces under three sets of wires. She doesn’t perform a feeling. She doesn’t make it about the years she missed. She doesn’t cry for an audience.

“They’re beautiful,” she says quietly. “You did a good job, Piper. I mean everything you built, not only what you survived today.”

I don’t know what to do with that, so I don’t do anything. She doesn’t need me to. She stays for exactly the right amount of time and then she goes, and it’s the best visit she’s ever paid me.

The nurse comes to the incubators with a clipboard once the visitors have gone and it’s just Nikita and me between the three of them.

“I need names when you’re ready.”

Nikita looks at me, and I look back at him. We say them together, because we settled this weeks ago in the dark with my hand on my stomach.

“Our first son is Pyotr,” I say. We chose it for Platon, another old Russian name beginning the same way because using his name outright would embarrass him. He spent four years keeping a dead man’s family alive; he’ll understand what the name means when we tell him.

“Our second son is Arkadi,” Nikita says, and I take his hand. “For the man my father might have been if he’d allowed himself to love us properly. Our son gets the name and the tenderness my father refused.”

“Our daughter is Sofia,” I say. We chose it because it fit our fierce little girl the moment we said it aloud.

The nurse writes them down and leaves, and then it’s just us.

Nikita pulls a chair as close to mine as it will go, and we sit between the three incubators, each of us with one hand through a porthole resting on a back the size of a paperback, and for a second, neither of us says anything at all.

For as long as I can remember, I was certain I’d carry everything alone, because trusting only myself was safe. Almost everyone I let close eventually became one more thing to protect or one more exit to plan. I robbed a dead man’s house because taking what I needed was safer than asking for it.

Now there are five of us, three of them asleep under lights in plastic boxes I can’t lift them out of yet, and I don’t have or need an exit plan.

“Nikita.” He looks up, his enormous hand disappearing into an incubator to cover a whole tiny back. “I love you. I don’t think I’ve said it enough since the safe house. I’m saying it now, in front of the only witnesses who matter.”

“They’re asleep, and none of them can hold their own head up.”

“They’ll grow into it.” I can’t reach his face across the incubators, so I reach his free hand instead and hold it just as I held it the morning he asked me to marry him. “I love you. That’s the whole sentence. No war on the other side of the door, no plan, and nothing I’m bracing for. I just love you.”

“I know,” he says, which is the most Nikita answer in the world, and then, because he’s learned, he says, “I love you too. All five of you. I spent four years sure I’d used up every good thing I was ever going to get.”

“You were wrong.”

“I was wrong about almost everything.” His thumb moves across the back of my hand. “My father taught me I couldn’t afford to love anything I wasn’t ready to lose, and I believed him for thirty-six years. I don’t believe him anymore.” He looks at his sons, then at our daughter scowling in her sleep behind the mask. “Being wrong about that is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Sofia shifts beneath my hand. Pyotr makes a small sound from the next incubator, and Arkadi answers him. Nikita holds my other hand between them. All three monitors continue their steady rhythm while we sit with our children through the first night.

EPILOGUE

NIKITA