Page 38 of Marrying the Pakhan

I decide to tell her about Saturday before bed, gently, the way Denise suggested, while she’s still in the kitchen finishing a glass of milk. It goes easier than I braced for.

“Grandma and Grandpa are going to visit with you on Saturday,” I tell her, keeping my voice light. “At a special place, just for a couple hours. I’ll drop you off and pick you up.”

“Will you be there, too?”

“Not in the room, but close by the whole time. Someone will be watching to make sure everything’s okay.”

She considers this with the same seriousness she brings to most things lately. “Do I have to go?”

“You do, this time. But it’s just a visit. Nothing’s changing about where you live, or who takes care of you.”

“Okay.” She says it simply, no protest, no tears, just a fact she’s filing away alongside everything else that’s happened to her this year. “Can Viktor come with me to the drop off part?”

“If he’s free, sure.”

“Okay,” she says again, and hops down from her chair, and I marvel, not for the first time, at how much more resilient she’s become than I ever expected a six-year-old to be forced into being.

She’s in her pajamas within minutes, doing the specific stalling routine she’s perfected over the last few months before bed, and by the time I’ve cleared the dinner plates, she’s already found the dragon book.

“Book time,” she announces, marching past me toward Viktor’s study and handing it to him without a word, without asking, without even glancing my way first.

He looks up from whatever he was reading, mild surprise in his expression before he sets it aside entirely.

“Two chapters,” she informs him, the same negotiating tactic she’s used for weeks now, though there’s no actual negotiation left in it anymore, just a formality she keeps out of habit.

“We’ll see how tired you get.”

“That’s not a no.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s not.”

I watch them head up the stairs together, Ginger already narrating some complaint about her math homework, Viktor listening with the same patient attention he’s given her every night for weeks now.

It hits me clearly, standing alone in the kitchen, how completely this has stopped being a performance for anyone’s benefit.

She doesn’t test him anymore. She doesn’t watch his face for signs he might disappear the way she used to watch mine after Mia died, bracing for the moment adults inevitably let her down.

She just assumes he’ll be there, the same way she assumes the sun will come up, and somewhere in the last few weeks, without either of us marking the exact date it happened, Viktor stopped being a stranger in this house.

He stopped being a stranger to me too, if I’m being honest with myself standing here alone with dinner dishes still in the sink.

I think about the man who agreed to marry me eight minutes after meeting me, intrigued more than obligated, and the man currently upstairs doing dragon voices for a child who isn’t his by blood.

I’m not sure those two men are entirely the same person anymore, or maybe they always were, and I just hadn’t given him enough time yet to show me.

There’s a version of tonight where I sit alone at this counter and worry about Saturday, about the family center and the clipboard and the two old people who spent months trying to take Ginger away from me. Instead, I find myself thinking about pasta recipes and dragon voices and a six-year-old who stopped bracing for goodbye months ago without either of us fully noticing when it happened.

I finish the dishes and head upstairs myself, catching the tail end of the fourth chapter through Ginger’s cracked door, Viktor’s voice pitched low and dramatic for whatever villain the dragon’s currently facing down.

I stand in the hallway a moment longer than I need to, just listening, before I let myself go find him properly once she’s finally, actually asleep.

Four months ago, I would have spent tonight bracing for Saturday instead of standing in a hallway listening to a man I married for paperwork read bedtime stories like he’s been doing it his whole life. I’m not sure when exactly the bracing stopped, only that somewhere along the way, it did, and I’m not in a hurry to get it back.

17

HARPER

Saturday starts the way most of our Saturdays do now, Viktor making coffee before either of us is fully awake, Ginger negotiating for pancakes instead of the cereal I’d normally hand her.