“I respect talent.”
“And Nikolai?”
Roman’s face shifts in that small, private way it always does when he talks about the children. Softer. Fuller. Less guarded.
“He watches everything,” he says. “You can almost hear him thinking.”
“He gets that from you.”
“No,” Roman says. “He gets that from you. I was much more reckless at his age.”
“Were you?”
He gives me a look over the rim of his glass. “You’ve heard the stories.”
I smile, but it doesn’t last long. I’m watching him too closely now. The line of his mouth, the tiredness around his eyes, the quiet steadiness that took so long to arrive in him. There are nights when I still catch flashes of the man he used to be, all sharp edges and forward motion, as if standing still long enough to feel anything might kill him.
Then there are moments like this, and I think maybe love didn’t soften him so much as teach him where to rest.
The thought catches me so hard I go still around it.
He notices immediately. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s twice.”
I look down at my glass, then back at him, and now I’m smiling in a way I can’t quite control. “I was just thinking,” I say.
“That’s always dangerous.”
“Yes.”
He sets his glass down and comes closer, one slow step at a time, like he already knows something in the room has changed and doesn’t want to break it by moving too fast. His hand settles on my waist. “What were you thinking?”
I should say something easy. Something dry. A joke. I have spent years getting out of tenderness by taking the side door into sarcasm.
Tonight, it doesn’t come.
Instead, I say, “That I’m happy.”
His face changes a little.
Not surprise exactly. Something quieter than that.
He strokes his thumb once over the side of my waist. “Good.”
I let out a breath. “That wasn’t the whole thought.”
“No?”
I shake my head. For one second, I think I’m going to say it first.
Then he looks at me the way he does when all the walls are down without either of us meaning them to be, and something in him gives before I can make myself brave.
“I love you,” he says.
I stare at him.
