Page 85 of Babies for the Boss
A lack of sleep probably plays into the disorientation, as well.
I look at the face in my hands, and I think about legacy, which is a word I have been using for my entire adult life to mean something specific. The continuation of the organization, the maintenance of the position, and the structures that persist beyond any individual. That is the thing people depend on, and it is why I must do my best to maintain my position.
It’s a great responsibility to ensure the safety of those who work for me. Their families. To maintain the structure of the bratva in a world that is against us. It’s a power we fight to attain and fight to keep, so we can use it to protect and provide.
I thought I understood legacy. I had a working definition that had served me for decades.
I was wrong.
Legacy is not power. It is not the organization, the position, or the structures. It is this. Legacy is what you leave in people, not in systems. And I have brought two people into this world who will be the start of something new.
She wakes up in my hands, grimacing up at me.
“Hello,” I say, quietly.
She blinks.
“I know. It’s a lot.”
She makes a fussing sound, and unglamorous, complete love crashes into me again and again, threatening to take over everything in my life.
An empty threat. It already has.
I have been reorganizing since the hospital. The reorganization will be ongoing and is somewhat overwhelming, but it must be done. I have been conducting it largely in the hours when Molly is asleep, and the house is quiet. She doesn’t need to know anything about it—she’s on maternity leave, though I keep telling her I can find someone to fill her role.
She insists she’s coming back to the office. But after how much labor took out of her, I hope to talk her out of that. She deserves to spend time with our girls. She deserves rest and anything else she ever wants.
I call Igor in at nine, and he comes into the study, smiling instantly the moment he sees her in my arms.
“How are they sleeping?” he asks.
“In shifts, it would seem. They have organized themselves into a rotation that ensures someone is awake at all times. I believe it’s deliberate.”
“They are your daughters. Already starting a proper watch cycle? Definitely yours.”
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“And Molly?”
“Sleeping now. She fed them at six, and I took over so she could sleep.” I look down at the one in my arms. “She needs it. She’s been—” I stop, because the sentence that wants to come is something like extraordinary, which is accurate and also insufficient and also not something I want to reduce to a status report to Igor. “She’s well,” I say instead. “She’s doing well.”
Igor nods. He looks at the baby in my arms with the expression he has been wearing around them since we came home from the hospital—a man finding the reminder that there is more to life more welcome than he expected. He doesn’t reach for her. He’s waiting to be offered.
“Take her,” I say, and transfer her with the practiced care that I have been developing over four days.
She regards him with her ancient, unfocused attention. He regards her with something that is not unfocused at all.
“I need to talk to you about the business,” I say.
Igor looks up. The shift in his attention is professional and immediate, the sovetnik assembling himself, while his hands remain careful around the sleeping weight. “What aspect?”
“All of it. Or—not all of it. But more of it than you’re expecting.”
He waits. This is one of the things I have always valued about Igor—he doesn’t fill silence with assumptions.
I look at my notes on the side table, which are not operational notes in the usual sense. They are a different kind of list, made over several nights in the armchair while my daughters slept and the house was quiet, and I was thinking about the thing I have understood. I begin with the biggest point of contention. “The guns.”
Igor is still.
