In daylight. That's the first impossible thing, before the rest of it hits me. I have seen this man materialize out of darkness, out of doorways, out of the corner of a cell in Sicily. I have never once seen him arrive. And here he is, standing in the flat, honest light of the morning where any camera can find him and every one of my brothers' men can see, holding, and this is the second impossible thing, an armful of flowers.
Irises. Of course they're irises. Dozens of them, purple and gold, wrapped in brown paper, slightly crushed on one side as if he held them too hard between the car and the steps.
"That's very on the nose," I hear myself say.
"I know," he says. "The woman in the shop said the same thing and asked me to reconsider."
His voice. For six weeks I have been losing the exact grain of it, the way it sits low and unhurried under everything, and having it back in my ears does something to my knees that I refuse to show him.
He looks the same and not the same.
Same stillness, same flint gray eyes that take the whole of me in one pass. But something has been unloaded from him. He used to stand like a man carrying weight in the dark. He's standing on my doorstep like a man who has set something down.
I take the flowers from him and marvel at their beauty.
"You knocked," I say. Wit of the county, they call me. Renowned everywhere for it.
"I did."
"You don't knock. You've never knocked on anything in your life. You come out of the walls."
"I'm finished coming out of the walls." He says it simply, without flourish. "Doors now. This one specifically, if you'll let me."
I should say something. There's a traffic jam of things, twelve weeks of them, some of them furious, and every one of them is jockeying for the exit at once, so what happens instead is nothing. I stand in my own doorway and shake, very slightly, holding a square photograph and looking at him.
His eyes go to my hand.
I watch it happen. I watch this man, who I have seen take a bullet with less reaction than most people give a paper cut, look at a crumpled grey and white printout in my fist and stop breathing. His whole stillness changes quality.
"Liam told me," he says quietly. "When we met." His jaw works once. "Knowing is not the same as seeing."
"When you met—" I repeat, trailing off. My voice comes out somewhere between a whisper and an accusation. "You met with Liam."
"Three days ago. In tow—." A pause. "I asked him for something. He took his time answering. He was right to."
The pieces fall in on me all at once, Liam'sRight, Liam's days of rewiring, Liam walking down the hallways just now slow as Sunday. My eyes are burning before Yakob even reaches into his jacket. What he takes out of the inside pocket is small and dark, and he doesn't kneel, he wouldn't know how. This is a man who has never once done anything the ornamental way, he just opens the little box with his thumb and holds it out flat on his palm, level with the photograph in my fist, like an exchange.
The ring is old gold, a pale stone, simple.
"I had a speech," he says. "I've been working on it forever, it feels. On planes and boats." His eyes have not left my face. Inall my life no one has looked at me the way this man looks at me. Like looking is the whole occupation. "So here's what's left of it. The work is done. All of it. There's no one on this earth left who would touch you, and I have nothing now. No contracts, no name that opens doors, no walls to hide in or come out of. I stood on a hill where my mother's kitchen used to be and I gave it back to her. What's left is just a man, and the man can't do it." His voice drops, and roughens, and for the first time since Lipari I hear it cost him. "I can't imagine a life without you in it, Iris. I've tried. I had twelve weeks and three continents to try. So if the work being done means anything, I'm hoping—" he stops, and starts again, "I'm hoping you can't imagine it either."
The bean in the photograph. The irises crushed on one side. The doorway that finally isn't empty…
"I don't even know your last name," I whisper, idiotically, because it's the wound I've been carrying and it comes out backwards.
"Vetrov," he says. "Yakob Vetrov. It means wind." Something moves at the corner of his mouth, that almost-smile that completely disarms me. "You can have it. Or keep your own. I'm not asking to marry you because of a name."
And that's it. That's the whole of my composure, gone, spent, the last of it burned off in one breath. I'm crying, and I'm laughing, and the photograph is still in my hand where it belongs, and I do the only thing left in the world to do.
I fling myself at him.
His face comes down into my hair and I feel it, the shudder that goes through the whole quiet length of him, the sound he makes that isn't a word in any language. The scent of irises rising around us like something breaking open.
Behind me, from the depths of the hall, comes the unmistakable sound of my entire familynoteavesdropping.
Epilogue
Iris
