"Spoilers, gremlin."
"It’s not a spoiler if I’m right." A pause. "Oh no. Oh no, the small one, I love the small one, if anything happens to the small one I’m gonna be so upset."
I do not say much. I do not need to. I am running a low fever and I have a small girl breathing against my ribs and a woman who agreed last week to call herself mine tucked under my arm, and the laptop fan is humming a tired warm note against my chest and Beom-Beom keeps falling sideways onto my knee and being righted. The room smells like the cold tea on the nightstand and the faint lemon of whatever cloth Chloe was using on my forehead. The late autumn light through the window has gone gold at the edges. The compound is quiet. Somewhere down the hall a door closes softly and a guard's boot taps once on the stair. None of it touches us.
Halfway through the movie, while the small character Rhea loves is doing something brave with bad odds, Chloe turns her head against my shoulder and looks up at me. I feel her look before I see it. I turn my face down to her.
She mouths two words, no sound.
Good job.
I do not have words for what that does to me. I pull her closer. My hand at her waist tightens. My other hand, without me telling it to, has settled on the top of Rhea's head, on the part where her two braids start, and my thumb is moving slow over her hair like I have been doing it her whole life. My breath goes out long and steady. Chloe's hand finds mine at her waist and her fingers slide between my fingers and do not let go.
I keep my eyes forward. I watch the bright movie. I do not trust my face.
I had thought being a brother meant standing between her and the world. I had thought being a man meant feeding and protecting and never showing what it cost. I did not know until this afternoon how much of either job was just this. Sitting in a warm bed with two people who loved me. Letting them see me. Not flinching while they did.
22
CHLOE
Late autumn light slanted across the breakfast nook, pale gold that turned everything two shades warmer than it actually was. Rhea sat across from me with a half-eaten waffle and a worksheet pushed aside, busy instead with a colored pencil and a piece of construction paper folded in two.
"What are you working on?" I asked, stealing a strawberry off her plate.
"Hey," Rhea said.
"You were saving it for last. I respect that. I also took it."
She gave me a long-suffering look and went back to her paper. "It's a secret project," she said.
"From me?"
"From everyone."
"Mysterious. I love it," I said.
The compound was quiet in that house-full-of-men-in-a-meeting way. Daniil and his brothers had disappeared into the study an hour ago with coffee and that set to their shoulders that meant Marchetti was on the table somewhere. Beom-Beom sat propped against the napkin holder, damaged ear flopped to one side, watching over Rhea's shoulder as she worked.
I sipped my coffee and watched her tongue poke out the corner of her mouth in concentration. No school, no urgent anything, just toast and the rasp of pencil on paper. I had gotten used to this.
Then I heard the front door, and the laughter behind it.
You can tell, with the Sorokin wives, when something is about to happen. Heels in the hall. A bag rustling. Someone shushing someone else and failing.
Lily swept in first, both arms full of helium balloons in candy colors, her cheeks pink from the cold. Behind her, Jade carried a white bakery box the size of a small suitcase. Sienna brought up the rear with two paper bags from Whitfield Ramen stacked like a Jenga tower.
I stared.
"What is all this?" I asked.
Lily let the balloons go. They drifted up and bumped politely along the ceiling, ribbons trailing.
"Your man's birthday," Lily said, her smile sharp and delighted.
My mouth fell open.
"What? How did I not know?" I said.
