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“Thank you for not letting him,” I say. “And thank you for telling me anyway.”

He tells me the rest. The hangar in Indiana. Riddings. The laptop and what was on it. My name on a floor plan.

He tells me Rusakov got away.

When he’s finished, the kitchen is very quiet. The sun’s fully up now, coming in low and gold through the window over the sink.

“I know who you are, Caleb,” I tell him. “I know what you do. I know what Papa did, and Garick, and Theo, and every man who ever walked through our front door with something on his cuffs. I grew up with it. I used to soak Papa’s shirts in cold water in the laundry room at two in the morning so the housekeeper wouldn’t see.”

He goes very still.

“Nobody ever talked about it,” I say. “Not once. Papa would come home, and change, and come down to dinner, and we’d all pretend. Mama would have known what to say, maybe. I don’t know. But after she died, nobody did. So we just... didn’t. We all just kept the silence, like it was another thing he left us to look after.”

I turn on the stool to face him properly.

“I’ve lived my whole life around Bratva men,” I say. “Hard, dangerous men who decided everything for me. And you’re the first one who ever told me the truth. You’re the first one who ever asked what I wanted and waited for the answer. The very first.”

His hand comes up, slowly, and cups my face.

“I love you,” I tell him.

It comes out easily, much more easily than I expected. Like it’s been sitting right behind my teeth for days, waiting for me to stop being afraid of it.

“I love you, Caleb. I think I started on Saturday, in Papa’s living room, when you stood up and wouldn’t sit down until I did. And I’ve been falling harder every single day since.”

He doesn’t say anything.

He just pulls me off my stool and into his lap, and holds me so tightly I can barely breathe, his face pressed into my neck. I feel his shoulders shake, once. And I hold on to him, and I don’t say anything either, because I don’t need to. He knows.

When he finally carries me upstairs, the sun’s pouring into the bedroom.

He sets me down by the bed, in the light, and he doesn’t hurry. He undoes my cardigan one button at a time, the way I washed his hands. Slowly, carefully, looking at my face the whole time.

“Say it again,” he says.

“I love you.”

“Again.”

“I love you.”

He lays me back on the sheets and comes down over me, and this time there’s nothing commanding in it. No orders, no tell me, no say it. Just his mouth, soft on mine. Just his hands, steady again, moving over my skin like he’s learning it all over.

“I love you,” he says against my lips. “Galana. My wife. I love you.”

I close my eyes and pull him down to me.

Later, I lie with my head on his chest and listen to him sleep.

He’s out completely. Heavy and slack and breathing deep and slow, one arm thrown across my waist like he’s afraid I’ll get up and leave. The sun has moved across the room, and the light on the ceiling has gone from gold to white. Somewhere outside, at the bottom of the garden, the lake is folding small waves against the wall.

I think about Mama.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to get back to that kitchen. Mama singing at the stove, the smell of honey, her warm hands. A house where nobody was ever scared. I thought if I cooked enough, if I took care of enough people, if I remembered every name and every birthday and every man who didn’t eat dairy, I could make that feeling come back.

It never did. I couldn’t make Papa’s house feel like hers. I don’t think anybody could have.

But lying here, in this room that’s still mostly cream and still mostly somebody else’s, with my husband asleep beside me and a dog bed by the back door for a dog we don’t have yet, I think maybe I’ve been trying to build the wrong thing.