Page 62 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

Celine stays sober and near the edges because she knows she hasn’t earned an easy place in Piper’s life.

I watch Piper cross to her and how carefully she manages it, the hug that lasts exactly as long as it should and no longer, with Piper ending it before Celine can turn it into another interaction she has to manage. Celine is still Celine. She’ll say something sharp before the afternoon’s over, or she’ll start drinking and talk too fast, or she’ll cry at the wrong moment and make it about herself. Even so, she’s on time because Callum picked her up, she’s clear-eyed for now, and she brought a gift she wrapped herself. Piper set the boundary months ago, and Celine has held to it. That deserves some credit. For Celine, honoring the boundary is an act of love she learned far too late.

Piper comes back to me looking strained.

“She did well,” I say.

“She did.” Piper leans into my side, and I take some of her weight because she’s earned the right to give it to someone. “She RSVP’d three times to make sure I still wanted her here. She never once did that when I was a kid and it actually mattered.” She watches her mother accept a coffee from a server and stay near the edge of the conversation, sober and present without trying to pull the room toward herself. “I keep waiting for it to hurt less that she can do it now, when she couldn’t do it then.”

“It’s allowed to hurt and be good at the same time.”

“When did you get wise?” She tips her head against my shoulder.

“I fell for a con artist. I had to learn to read the room.”

Vera moves through the party like she owns it, because in every way that matters except the deed, she does.

She has repositioned two flower arrangements, redirected the caterers twice, and corrected a server’s pour without breaking stride. Now, she descends on Piper with the signature energy she reserves for people she has decided to keep alive.

“Piper, you will sit down before you fall down.” Vera takes her by the elbow and steers her toward a chair. “You will let me bring you a plate, because you’re carrying three new members of my family and I didn’t spend forty years in this house to watch you deliver them on the terrace.”

Piper sits. She knows better than to argue with Vera, a wisdom it took me three decades to acquire.

She called her Piper instead of the girl. For two months after Piper moved in, Vera called her nothing at all, addressed her in the third person while she stood in the room, talking around her like a stain she hadn’t decided how to remove. Then it was the girl, which was worse and better at once, an acknowledgment shaped like an insult. It took Vera months to use Piper’s name, and she just did it in front of both families without appearing to notice.

Piper notices. She looks at me over Vera’s shoulder, her eyes wide, and I lift my glass another half inch, and this time, it means I know, I heard it too. Hold still and let it happen.

Angelina finds me where I’ve drifted back to the terrace doors.

“You’ve got the look,” she says, following where I’m looking, at Piper. My sister is thirty and reads me faster than anyone alive except Platon, a skill she developed by learning to read our father before he spoke.

“What look do I have?”

“The one Mama used to get.” She says it gently, because she knows what she’s handing me. “In the early home movies, Mama would watch Papa across a room without knowing the camera was on her. That was before he hardened.” Angelina slides her arm through mine. “You look at Piper like Mama looked at Papa in nineteen eighty-something, before the business hardened him enough that he stopped looking back.”

I don’t have a dry answer for that. Arkadi Rusakov spent my whole childhood teaching me that a man in his position couldn’t afford to love anything he wasn’t prepared to lose, and I spent four years dead proving him right. I’m standing in his house holding a glass to celebrate impending fatherhood because a forger walked in and taught me he was wrong.

“He looked back sometimes,” I say. “When you were still too young to remember his face. There’s a film of your christening where he holds you the whole service and never once checks the room. I found it going through Mama’s things. I didn’t know he had it in him either, until I watched my hard, careful father doing it on a Sunday, soft for the length of one home movie.” I have to stop for a second. “I’d like these three to have that version of me on film and in their memories. I don’t want them to have the other version.”

“I remember enough to know you’re doing the opposite on purpose.” She squeezes my arm. “It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, and I’ve watched you do some very impressive things, most of them illegal.”

Platon appears at my other side, because he has a talent for arriving exactly when a moment threatens to become sentimental.

“The last two monitored transfers clear Thursday,” he says, quietly, under the party noise. “The Geneva structure and the shipping entity will be finished after that. There’s nothing left with a false floor. It’s all disclosed, all legitimate, and all boring.” He surveys the room like a man checking exits out of habit he no longer needs. “You built something worth having, and then you gave it away and kept the only part that mattered. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Neither did I.”

“Maren says—” He stops, because Maren has appeared across the room and is giving him a look that means she wants him for something, and he looks toward Maren and forgets the rest of the sentence. “I’m being summoned.”

“Then you should go.”

He goes. I watch Maren catch his hand as he reaches her, easy, unhidden, the two of them folding into a conversation with someone’s grandmother like they’ve been doing this for years. Six months ago, Platon would have stayed against the wall. Now he lets Maren pull him into the middle of the room, though I catch him checking the terrace doors over her shoulder.

I know how it started, because Platon told me himself, once, in the fewest words he could manage. He was the one who installed the security at Maren’s studio the week the men came for her binder. He stayed three nights on a cot in her back office while his people swept the block. On the third night, she stopped pretending to be afraid of him and started arguing with him about coffee, and Platon, who has survived two bratva wars and my funeral, told me he had no defense prepared for someone arguing with him purely for the fun of it. They have been together quietly ever since, through the kidnapping, the search, and the long grinding months of paperwork after. Watching them now I think the war took a great deal from all of us and, on its way out, handed a few of us back something better than what it took.

Angelina starts gathering everyone near the terrace doors for photographs. Piper pushes herself up out of her chair, then stops and grips its edge.

I’m across the room but I’m always watching her now, and I see her close one hand around the wood, as she freezes in a way that isn’t the tired stillness of eight months carrying triplets.