Page 73 of Babies for the Boss
“I know.”
She blinks. “You’re not going to argue?”
“You made your argument. I’m not in the habit of relitigating decided matters. You are staying. I have accepted this.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
She narrows her eyes slightly. “You’re afraid of it.”
“Enormously.”
“But you’re also—” She tilts her head, reading me with the accuracy she has been developing for months, and something in her expression shifts into something warmer and quieter. “You’re glad.”
I look at her for a moment. There is no response to that that is not a complete confirmation of everything she has just said, and we both know it. “Both of those things simultaneously, which is apparently the condition of my life now.”
“The conflicted pakhan,” she says, with the dry lightness that lives in her voice when she is settling back into herself after something difficult.
“Something like that.”
She considers me for a moment with those steady eyes. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life being afraid for me, aren’t you?”
“In all probability, yes. And vice versa, I imagine.”
“And I’m going to spend the rest of my life being annoyed about what you don’t tell me.”
“That seems likely.”
She smiles, setting the world right again. “And we’re going to argue about it regularly.”
“I expect so.”
She nods, with the grave consideration of someone reviewing the terms of an agreement they have already signed. “Okay. I can work with that.”
“Can you?”
“I’ve been working with it for months. I’m practically an expert.” She tilts her head. “I will need you to get better at the telling-me-things part, though. The Vet situation—that cannot happen again. Not telling me she was alive while I was sitting in a hospital room crying about her is—” She stops, and the lightness dims briefly into something more genuine. “That was a lot, Pavel. That was a lot to carry alone.”
“It won’t happen again.”
She looks at me to determine whether I mean it. I mean it, and she can see that I mean it, and she nods once. “Pavel.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a very strange man.”
“You chose me,” I point out.
“Repeatedly,” she agrees, without any indication that she regrets this.
I am afraid. I will be afraid. It will not leave. It will be present in every decision I make about her safety, the children’s safety, and the architecture of the life we are building in the middle of a world that does not readily accommodate the kind of thing weare attempting. It’s a fear I will live with, however long this life is.
I am also, underneath all of that, in the room with my wife in the early morning light, more glad than I have been since I understood what being glad felt like. Both things. Simultaneously.
The conflicted life of a pakhan who made the mistake of falling in love with the right woman, a mistake I have absolutely no interest in correcting.
I pull her close to me, letting her warmth invade my space. A warmth I have craved my whole life until I found her. “Sleep. You need it.”
