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We eat on the terrace, because Galana insists.

It’s chilly. The heaters under the awning glow orange, and everyone’s in coats, and Theo’s grilled enough shashlik for thirty people. Galana’s brought out pelmeni and roast chicken and a salad with dill, and black bread, and pickles, and the cherry thing, and a medovik she made yesterday. Twelve layers, still setting.

Pelmen sits under the table and gets fed by everyone and pretends to be starving.

The noise is extraordinary.

Arina and Garick argue about the wedding flowers. Zhenya and Theo argue about whether you can get a mortgage on a houseboat, which nobody understands the context of. Evaria reads items from her list out loud, and everyone tells her they won’t happen, and then Theo tells her that the forecast’s for rain and she throws a pickle at him.

Galana sits in the middle of it all and laughs.

Not quietly. Not behind her hand, the way she did at the bakery on that first day. Out loud, with her head tipped back. Her cheeks are pink from the heaters, and somebody else has filled her plate for her. I watch her sisters lean toward her without even thinking about it, the way plants lean toward a window.

Nobody talks over her.

When she starts to say something, Arina stops talking. Then Evaria stops. Then all of them, one after another, until there’s a pocket of quiet in the middle of the noise. They wait for her to finish.

I don’t think they’ve noticed they’re doing it.

I don’t think Galana’s noticed either.

I stand up and take my glass to the doorway of the kitchen, and lean against the frame, and watch them.

Yaroslav knew.

I understand that now, in a way I didn’t even last week. I thought he chose me for her because I’d notice what everyone else missed. That’s true. But it was never the whole of it.

He saw me, too.

Five times he offered me a job, and five times I turned him down. He watched me turn down everything. Family, partners, a house, a place at anybody’s table. He watched me live in hotels and take my coffee black and keep a house I’d never once slept in. He knew, the way a man who’s lost his wife knows, what it looks like when someone’s decided he’s better off with nothing to lose.

And he sent me to his daughter.

The one who’s spent her whole life building homes for people who didn’t notice. The one who’d look at an empty, cream-colored house with plastic on the range knobs and see a swing on the oak branch.

He gave me to her as much as he gave her to me.

The old bastard.

Galana turns in her chair and finds me in the doorway. She doesn’t say anything. She just smiles, the private one she saves for me. Then she gets up and comes over and puts her arms around my waist, her cheek against my chest.

“You’re watching me again,” she says.

“I’m always watching you.”

“I know.” She tips her head back and looks up at me. “What are you thinking?”

I look over her head at the table. At Arina leaning into Garick, and Theo with his arm around Evaria, and Zhenya alone at the end with her wine and her stubborn chin. At the dog asleep on Theo’s boot. At the long table, the mismatched chairs, and the empty seats waiting for Milana and whoever else turns up.

“I love you,” I tell her.

Her eyes go soft.

“I love you, and I want this,” I say. “All of it, every Sunday, for the rest of our lives. Your sisters and their husbands, and too much food and too much noise.” I lower my voice. “And I want children, Galana. Lots of them. I want to fill this house until there’s no quiet left in it. Muddy shoes by the back door. A swing on that branch. I want you singing in the kitchen and kids running through it, and I want to stand in this doorway and watch every single second of it.”

She doesn’t answer. She can’t. She just presses her face against my chest and holds on, the way she always does.

Behind us, Theo shouts something, and Arina laughs, and the dog barks once in his sleep.