Page 21 of Bred By the Tsar

"I know." Hazel's voice doesn't waver, though I can see what it costs her. "I picked it on purpose. So your mama's always part of our family. So nobody ever forgets her. Is that okay?"

I watch my older daughter understand, all at once, the thing it has taken her seven careful years and one extraordinary woman to learn: that being loved by someone new is not a betrayal of someone lost. That there is room. That hands reaching down to choose you are not always, in the end, a lie.

Lena looks at the baby. She looks at Hazel — who named a child after a ghost rather than let that ghost be forgotten, who came back across an ocean she was already on, who has never once, not for a single day, made my daughter compete for a place she was always going to have.

Lena's face crumples.

"Mama," she says to Hazel, and climbs straight up onto the bed and into her arms, careful of the baby, fierce around everything else, and buries her face in Hazel's neck. "Mama."

I have to turn and look very hard out the window at the snow so my children don't see their father weep.

It's snowing. It always is, here. But for the life of me, standing in a warm room with my wife and three children and a name I'd buried come back as a beginning, I cannot find the cold in it anywhere.

Later the room is dim, Misha asleep in a chair too big for him, Lena curled at the foot of the bed refusing to leave, Tatiana a warm weight against my chest no bigger than a loaf of bread and Hazel watching me hold our daughter with a look I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.

"You realize," she murmurs, "we're going to need help. Three of them now."

"No nanny."

She blinks at me. "Konstantin. Three children. One of them brand new."

"No nanny." I look down at the impossibly small face on my chest, then back at her. "I began this whole life with a stranger hired out of a file to raise my children — because I'd decided I was too important and too frozen to do it myself. A woman my mother chose, sight unseen, to stand in the place a parent is supposed to stand." My throat works. "I am never putting a hired stranger in that place again. Not now that I finally understand what it's worth."

"You want to raise them the old-fashioned way," she says slowly. "Ourselves."

"As much as two people in this ridiculous gilded house can manage anything the old-fashioned way — yes." The corner of my mouth lifts. "There'll be a cook, because between us we'd burn the palace down. There'll be tutors, and Grigor will require medical leave over the security of letting three royal children do anything as reckless as a normal childhood. But the bedtimes are ours. The scraped knees. The bad dreams. The favorite colors." I hold her eyes. "Especially the favorite colors."

She sniffles, blinking away tears.

"There's no nanny to hire," I tell her, quietly. "There never was, really. You were never the help, Hazel. You were theirs from the afternoon Misha climbed into your lap and Lena decided to risk her favorite color. We just took a while to call the thing by its right name." I tip my head at the three children breathing in the dim room. "Mama. That's the only position open in this family, and it's filled."

Hazel laughs and reaches over to lay her hand on our daughter's back, beside mine.

"You were so sure," she says softly. "That first night. That you weren't built for this."

"I wasn't." I catch her hand, lace our fingers over the rise and fall of Tatiana's breathing. "You built it. You walked into my house and built the whole thing while I was still insisting it couldn't exist."

"I was so sure too," she says. "That I was only ever passing through.”

"And now?"

She looks around the dim warm room at the sleeping boy, the fierce girl, the new daughter, the husband who would still, tonight, burn the country to the waterline for any one of them.

"Now I'm home," she says.

"Now you're home," I agree, and it is the truest sentence I have ever spoken, and outside the snow comes down patient and endless over a palace that is no longer, has not been for a long time now, anything at all like cold.

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