Page 91 of Marrying the Pakhan

“You’re staring,” she says, without opening her eyes.

“I’m allowed to stare at my own wife.”

“You’ve said that exact line before.”

“It remains true every single time I say it.” I sit beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch, and take the offered glass she’s already poured for me, an old habit neither of us bothers commenting on anymore. “I was thinking about the club tonight. About the night you walked in and mistook me for a stranger you could hire for a few months.”

“That feels like a lifetime ago.”

“It does. And it doesn’t, somehow, both at once.” I turn the wine glass slowly, watching the porch light catch it. “I agreed to that arrangement because it cost me nothing. Because I genuinely believed a temporary marriage to a stranger was the easiest, least complicated transaction I’d make all year.”

“You were spectacularly wrong.”

“Spectacularly,” I agree. “I don’t think I understood, standing in that hallway shaking your hand, that I was agreeing to the single most significant decision of my entire life. Not the marriage itself. Everything it eventually became.”

Harper’s quiet a moment, studying me with the particular focus she still brings to conversations that matter.

“Do you regret any of it? The way it started, I mean. How complicated it got before it got easy.”

“Not for a single second.” I mean it completely, the truth of it settling somewhere solid in my chest. “Every difficult piece of this, the silence, the danger, everything I got wrong before I finally got it right, all of it led directly here. I wouldn’t trade the ease of a simpler path for a version of my life that doesn’t include exactly this family.”

“Even the parts where I was furious with you for months at a time?”

“Especially those parts. They taught me I could survive your anger and still keep you, which is more than I ever expected to learn about myself.”

She leans into me, resting her head against my shoulder, and we sit there together a long while, the house quiet behind us, both children finally asleep, danger finally, genuinely behind us in a way I still sometimes have to remind myself to fully believe.

“I love you,” she says eventually, simple, certain, no hesitation left in it at all. “I don’t think I say that enough, given everything we’ve survived to actually get here.”

“You say it exactly enough. And I love you too, more than I knew I was capable of feeling for anyone, before you walked into my club and changed the entire trajectory of my life without either of us realizing it yet.”

She laughs, soft and warm, and tips her face up to kiss me, unhurried, certain, nothing left between us that needs protecting or hiding or managing anymore.

I hold the woman who walked into my club with nothing but nerve and a ridiculous proposal, and I understand completely how lucky I am that she did.

The End.