All of them. Every single one.
Ma is in front and she isn’t walking, she's coming down those steps like a landslide, and behind her the courtyard is filling with brothers and wives and I can hear the screaming through the car window. My hand is on the door handle before the car has finished moving, which under any other circumstances would earn me a lecture on safety, but Yakob doesn't say a word.
I don't remember crossing the gravel.
But now Ma’s hands are on my face, both of them, hard, her thumbs under my cheekbones like she's checking for marks on porcelain, her stark, tired eyes moving over me at a speed no scanner will ever match. She doesn't ask if I'm all right. She reads me instead, the whole of me, end to end, and then herface crumples in a way I have never once seen it crumple. Not at weddings, or at christenings, not ever, and she pulls me into her and says something into my hair in Irish that I don't fully catch but don't really need to.
Then the rest of them hit us like a tidal wave.
Liam gets there first, or maybe Killian, it's impossible to say, because suddenly I'm inside a structure made entirely of brothers. Someone's arm is a bar across my back. Someone's hand cradles the back of my head the way you hold an infant. Somebody is talking softly and continuously in Russian, which is probably Killian. Somebody else's chest is hitching against my shoulder in a way that he will deny until his dying day. The smell of them, fresh and edged with gun oil and Ma's kitchen, undoes something in me that Sicily never managed to touch.
"You're here," Rafferty keeps saying, like the sentence has a fault in it and needs restarting. "You're here. You're here."
"I'm here," I say, muffled, from somewhere inside the scrum. "I'd like to state for the record that I can't breathe, but I don't care."
A wet laugh goes through all of them at once, the same laugh in five registers, and the structure loosens just enough to let the women in. Grace, crying without any attempt at dignity. Katya, gripping my hand so hard her rings will leave grooves. Tanya, whose belly has gotten visibly bigger in the last two weeks, which does something absurd to my heart, because the world kept going. It kept going and it waited for me at the same time. Nadia arrives and doesn't say anything at all. She just presses her forehead to my temple, and I understand her completely, because three years ago I did the same thing for her, and neither of us needs to translate.
They move me inside the way a river moves a leaf. I don't walk into the kitchen so much as arrive there, carried on hands andvoices. The kitchen closes over me, warm and bright and loud, smelling of bread and lamb and the candles Ma has clearly been burning around the clock. Spread over the table is enough food for a party of fifty, because in this family fear has always been fought with food.
And in the doorway of my childhood, half in the last of the daylight, stands Connor with a bundle of pink against his chest.
The room quiets by a degree. Even our family understands some entrances.
"Iris," he says, and his scarred mouth does its best version of a smile, "there's someone here who's been waiting to meet her aunt."
I cross the kitchen on legs I can't feel. The bundle has a face. The face is small and furious and perfect, with a shock of dark hair, and Anya, hollow-eyed and radiant at Connor's shoulder, folds the blanket back so I can see all of her.
"We waited to christen her," Anya says. "We wouldn't do it without you. But she has her name."
"She's called Éirinn," Connor says. His voice cracks straight down the middle on the second syllable. "It means peace. We picked it the week you were gone.”
I hold my niece and I cry, and nobody in this kitchen tells me not to, and for once in my life I don't tell myself not to either. I learned that on an island. I learned it on a stone floor in a stranger's arms.
The stranger.
I look up.
He's exactly where I knew he would be, because I've spent real time learning where he puts himself in any given room, and the answer is always the same. Back to the wall, beside the door, the whole space in front of him. The Ghost's spot. The kitchenroars and eddies around him and doesn't touch him. Killian has stationed himself a few feet away, arms crossed, watching him with an expression that hasn't decided what it is yet, and Yakob is enduring it the way he endures everything, without appearing to notice.
While I watch, Liam crosses to him. My oldest brother stops in front of the man who brought me home, and Yakob takes something small from his jacket pocket and puts it in Liam's palm without a word.
I know what it is. I watched it come off the hand it belonged to.
Liam looks at the gold for a long moment. Something moves through his face, dark and satisfied and as old as our name, and his fist closes around the ring. He says something to Yakob, quiet, two sentences at most. Yakob answers with less. Liam holds out his hand and Yakob shakes it once, the entire wordless transaction takes ten seconds.
Then Liam comes back to the light and the noise, and Yakob stays by the wall. The kitchen swallows my brother whole and leaves the man who saved me standing at the edge of everything like a coat someone forgot on a hook.
He's watching me. He's been watching me the entire time. I'm holding a baby named for peace, jammed between my mother and my sisters-in-law with tears drying on my face, home, safe, loved beyond the wildest belief, and the man responsible is standing at the border of it all like it's a country he doesn't have papers for.
I can see it in his eyes.
I've gotten fluent in him. It took a bullet, a fever, a farmhouse, and the worst week of my life, but I can read Yakob now the way Ma reads a room, and what's written on him from acrossmy mother's kitchen is this:look at where you belong. Look at everything you already have.
He thinks he's just delivering me. Completing a contract. He thinks this is the end.
No. I put the thought into my eyes and aim it at him with everything I have.You absolute idiot. Don't you dare.
I hand Éirinn back to Anya. I get one step.
