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After a while, Evaria calls Galana’s name. She needs her for something. They always need her for something. My wife squeezes my hand once and goes back to the table.

I stay in the doorway.

The terrace heaters glow, the candles gutter in the wind off the lake, and the women of the Maximov family close around my wife like a circle of warm light in the dark. She’s laughing again, at something Arina’s said. She’s got flour on her cheek still. Nobody’s told her. I’m not going to either.

I have stood guard over men worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I have protected diamonds and bank vaults and secrets that could topple governments. I’ve stood between powerful men and the people who wanted them dead, and never once flinched.

Not one of them was worth half of what’s at that table.

The noise. The light. The chairs that don’t match. The house that was never a home, until she walked into it and peeled the plastic off the range.

Of everything I’ve ever kept safe, this is the only thing I’d die for.

And I’ll spend every day for the rest of my life making sure I never have to.

EPILOGUE

GALANA

Six months later

Iknow before the test does.

I’ve known for nine days, really. Since the morning I made Caleb’s coffee and the smell turned my stomach so badly I had to go and stand in the garden in my robe. Since I fell asleep on the blue sofa at four in the afternoon with Pelmen on my feet, and woke up at seven with no idea where the day had gone. Since my body started feeling like a house where someone has quietly moved the furniture in the night.

I notice things. It’s what I do.

But I wanted to be sure. So this morning, after Caleb kissed me goodbye and drove into the city to meet Leo, I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom with a box from the pharmacy in Wilmette. I sat on the edge of the bath with my heart in my throat, watching the little window.

Two lines.

I sat there for a long time. Then I laughed, out loud, alone in the bathroom with the door locked. Then I cried. Then I laughed again. Pelmen scratched at the door and whined until I let him in, and I sat on the bathroom floor with forty pounds of golden retriever in my lap and told him first.

He licked my face. I’m choosing to take that as a good sign.

I spend the afternoon cooking.

The dining room is yellow now. A soft, buttery yellow, like the inside of a lemon cake. Caleb pretended to hate it for a week. Then I caught him standing in the doorway one evening with his coffee, just looking at the walls, and I knew.

There’s a swing on the oak tree. He hung it himself in March, on a Sunday, while my sisters sat on the terrace and shouted advice. It took him three hours, two ladders, and one argument with Garick about knots. It hangs from the smooth place on the low branch, where the old one used to be.

Nobody’s sat on it yet. Not properly. Pelmen tried, once, and it didn’t go well.

I make the dinner I’ve been planning for nine days.

Black bread, still warm. Eggs with dill, the way I made them the second morning he came to Papa’s house. Kolbasa. A pot of tea in Mama’s blue teapot. And for dessert, apple cake, the one from the Polish bakery on Chicago Avenue.

I had to go back four times to get the recipe. The old woman behind the counter wouldn’t give it to me at first. On the third visit, I told her it was for my husband. She asked who my husband was. I told her he was the tall one who always sat at the back, facing the door.

She went into the kitchen and came back with a card in shaky Polish handwriting and refused to take any money for it.

I set the table in the yellow room. Two places, side by side, not across from each other. I put pink tulips in the middle in a glass vase. I light candles. Then I go back to the kitchen and do one last thing, very carefully, at the counter.

I take a sheet of wax paper and wrap something small in it, tightly, folding the ends the way I always do.

Then I take a black marker from the drawer and write a name on it.

Caleb comes home at seven.