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I guess I’ve always just assumed it would be loud and bombastic. Fireworks and applause. The roar that comes after a war is won. But it isn’t like that at all.

As it turns out, happiness is a high school biology teacher humming a Bollywood song off-key while she repots the herbs she bullied me into buying. It’s Div’s tail thumping the floor at six in the morning when she shuffles out of my bedroom in my shirt, blearily blinking at the eggs I’ve made her the way she likes. It’s the scratch of her red pen as she builds review packets for the long-term substitute now squatting in her classroom, since my contrary woman marched into that school last week (flanked by three men she pretended not to see) and converted her ailing grandmother fiction into a formal, unpaid leave of absence through the end of the fall semester. Family medical situation. Out-of-state care. The principal practically wept with relief at getting a plan instead of a vanishing, and Meera walked out having negotiated approval rights over the sub’s lesson sequencing, because God himself could not stop this woman from managing her own absence.

Unpaid, though.

Which is how I discovered the ledger.

A composition notebook, hidden between cookbooks like contraband, every dollar I’ve spent on her recorded in red ink: rent for the Jamaica Plain apartment, the new phone, the dress, the abominable Sephora haul. Itemized. Dated. A running total she intends—as per the underlined header—to repay in full.

I have more money than God. We had a fight about it that she won, in the sense that the ledger stays, and I won, in the sense that I get to keep paying for things. Neither of us has acknowledged the third column she added last week, where the repayment plan quietly changed from a lump sum to installments. As if she’s planning on time. As if she’s planning on staying.

I haven’t said a word. I’m too superstitious to jinx it.

She Zoom calls the nerd kid, Priya, twice a week, walking her through practice exams while I pretend to read in the next chair. Mostly, I like listening to the calm tenor of her voice, even if I don’t know what the fuck she’s on about.

She had lunch with her best friend, Nia, at Janella’s café, introducing her to another one of my sisters-in-law. I listened to enough of the recap to know that Nia bought the whirlwind romance about seventy percent of the way, before declaring the remaining thirty was reserved “until I look this man in his eyes,” and is, in Meera’s words, “a problem for Future Meera.”

I believe Meera when she tells me we’ll get along well.

Happiness is our Fact for Fact game played while horizontal in the dark, trading childhood stories like prisoners tapping code through a wall, until one of us falls asleep mid-sentence. It’s always her—and lately, earlier and earlier. I’m sure I’ll tire of watching her sleep like some sentimental motherfucker, but I haven’t yet.

My infernal sling came off on Tuesday. Yulia poked at the scar, pronounced me “annoyingly durable,” and warned me not to lift anything heavy for another month. I celebrated that night by lifting Meera onto the kitchen counter, which Dr. Sister-in-Law can take up with my fucking lawyer.

Happiness is the most glorious three weeks of my goddamn life.

It’s the sword hanging over my head, too.

And I’ve still got to keep going, because life doesn’t come to a pause.

Freshly freed from my shackle of a sling, I opt to make the drive alone to see my little brother. I left all manner of protection for Meera, who’d been lost in deep sleep, plus a note on the nightstand mentioning errands. She’d get what I mean—even if I haven’t divulged the details.

Obviously, it doesn’t escape me that I’ve made it that way on purpose. If I did tell Meera the details—if I shared with her that Miron had texted me bright and early, and that my errand was deciding whether her dirty cop dad was the fucking mole—I don’t know how she’d react. I’m not ready to ask. At least not until I know what to even ask her.

Miron lives in a glass tower in the Seaport that looks like a perfume ad. It smells like one, too. He answers the door barefoot, what looks like last night’s shirt hanging open. There’s a thick, daunting folder already on the kitchen island behind him, beside a tiny cup of what I already know is espresso.

“It’s bad,” I deduce.

“Just come in.”

He gestures me in, and we walk to his kitchen in tandem. He starts to grab me an espresso of my own. I open the file. I read it—once, then a second time. It looks like happiness has turned me into a fucking idiot who humiliates himself by hunting for a version of events where things are different. And they aren’t. This is what it is: incriminating.

Ray Gallagher has been dirty for fucking years. The Quincy LLC is only the newest layer of a set-up that goes back nearly a decade. There are accounts in the Caymans and Cyprus, deposits choreographed to duck under every reporting threshold, and fucking piles of money being moved. He’s linked to an account that received a fat payment nine days before we lost the Morozov corridor. Another inside the same week the Harborside audit was triggered.

He is deeply entrenched in bratva bullshit. Maybe he isn’t the mole—but he’s fucking connected, somehow. He’s profiting off of it, whatever his part is. And that makes him our enemy.

Even though his daughter is still sleeping in my bed.

I can feel Miron watching me go over the numbers over and over again. “Sonya’s sure?” I ask, voice thick, though I know the answer.

“You know she wouldn’t send info up the ladder if it weren’t solid.”

Tersely, I nod. “Yeah. I know.”

“What’re you going to do?”

About Meera, is the unspoken half of that question. He doesn’t say it. He knows better. I’ve never felt farther away from my kin, because I don’t know how the fuck to explain her. Especially after all these years of Miron and I giving the others endless shit about their fucking sentimentality—and now, here I am, falling hard and fast for a woman I bought, no matter my reasons. It isn’t that I don’t know it’s a bad fucking idea. I’m not an idiot; I’ve known from the first spark of attraction at the very sight of her that it’s a bad fucking idea. But I can’t seem to send her away. To want her to leave, maybe ever. Yet she’s in my life because her father probably sold her or fucked up and messed with the wrong motherfuckers.

I sigh. “I have to ask her questions I don’t want to. I’m going to have to dig into her and destroy her. And she’s going to hate me again.”