Page 47 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

She slept here. She made the bed behind her with square corners, though the sheets barely look disturbed. She’s dressed already, hair pulled back, and she has the look she wears when she’s decided something and is bracing for me to argue with it. The bag is small. That matters. If she meant to leave for good, she’d pack more than one shirt. One change of clothes means she needs air, not an exit, and the difference is the only reason I can breathe.

“I’m going to Maren’s for a few hours,” she says. “I need a room you’re not standing in while I think. That’s all it is. I’ll be back by afternoon.”

“I know.” I stay in the doorway instead of crossing to her, because crowding her now would prove every word she said last night. “Before you go, I need to say the thing I should have said in the office, and I need you to hear it before you leave. I won’t follow you.”

She sets down the bag. She doesn’t sit, but she sets the bag down, and I take that as the only permission I’m going to get.

“You asked me last night whether my world would always come first.” I keep my voice calm, which is almost impossible. “The honest answer is that for four years, it was the only thing that came at all. There was no first or second. There was survival, and there was everyone I couldn’t protect while I managed it. When you asked, I almost gave you the old answer, because the old answer kept me alive. That half-second you saw wasn’t me choosing the war over you. It was me finding out the answer had already changed and not having said it out loud yet.”

“Words.” She glances at the bag but doesn’t pick it up.

“I made you believe the war would always come before you,” I say. “You were right about what I do when I’m afraid. I pull everything in close, I decide alone, and I did it to you with your own brother. I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t reach for the bag either, so I keep going.

“I know you don’t accept just words. Neither do I.” I step into the room, one step, and stop. “I’ve already acted. This week, I authorized the dissolution of Tessendorf, Ostrova, and Hesston. I closed their operations, and the nominee directors filed the first documents. The entities will be gone before the quarter ends. Together, they represent eight figures of infrastructure I spent a decade building. Norov, Voronin, and the Adler brothers got severance letters and clean exits, because I don’t need inherited muscle for the life I’m building. I authorized the foundation’s reorganization as an independent restitution nonprofit. Its board will oversee it, auditors will review the accounts, and my mother’s name will finally belong to something honest. I did all of it quietly, because I wanted the action behind the words before I said any of them. The work has started, and I can’t reverse it now without leaving a record.”

She’s very still now, but she no longer looks braced to run. She lowers her shoulders and looks at the bag instead of the door.

“I’m not asking you to survive my world, Piper. I started dismantling it before we flew south the second time, one holding at a time, because I would rather live than only keep surviving, and a life isn’t a thing you can build around a war you’re still fighting.” I make myself say the last of it, the part I’ve never said to anyone because there was never anyone to say it to. “I was doing it whether you stayed or not. I’d rather do it with you in the house. That’s the whole of it. That’s what I should have said instead of building a file on your brother.”

For a moment, she doesn’t move at all. She stands there with the small bag at her feet, the strap still looped over one finger, and the whole argument from last night still in the air between us, clearly deciding. I’ve watched her make a hundred smaller choices. This is the first one that settles whether I still have a future with her.

She crosses the room, presses both palms over my heart, and turns her face into my shoulder, and she exhales against my collar like she’s been holding that breath since the office. “I’ve been so scared this wasn’t possible,” she says into my shirt. “That I wanted a future you couldn’t actually give me, and I’d figure it out too late to leave.”

“I’ve been scared of the same thing from the other side.” I put my hand on the back of her head and hold it there. “That I’d get all the way to a life worth having and lose the person I wanted beside me in it.”

She looks up at that, and whatever she was going to say to Maren, she doesn’t need to think about in another room anymore.

She doesn’t go to Maren’s. She texts something one-handed and puts the phone away, and then we do the strangest thing either of us has done in weeks. We walk through the house.

We aren’t checking security or sightlines. For years, I walked these halls counting weaknesses, regarding every window as a liability and every door a thing that could open the wrong way. This morning, I walk them with her hand in mine and notice, as if I never had before, that my mother chose good light for the morning rooms.

We open every door and argue about what belongs behind each one, and Piper walks into rooms this place has kept shut for four years. “What’s this one?” she asks in the doorway of a corner room with north light and nothing in it but dust and a single chair under a film of grime.

“My father meant it to be a study, but he was too busy to ever use it.”

“It should be a library.” She walks the perimeter, and I watch her measure it with the same eye she uses on a forgery, seeing what it should be instead of what it is. “You have four boxes of books in the cellar that someone packed and forgot, and I read auction paperwork at the kitchen island every night because this house doesn’t own a single comfortable chair to read in. Put the shelves on that wall. The light’s right for it.”

She keeps moving through the house, and I follow her because I want to see it as she sees it. She stops in the doorway of the big empty room over the garden, the one with the good southern light my mother would have loved, and she rests a hand on the frame and looks at it a moment longer than the others. I don’t ask what she sees. Whatever it is, it belongs to her until she decides to tell me.

“You’ve thought about this.”

“I’ve thought about this since the second week, and I hated myself for it every time.” She rubs a smear of dust off her thumb, keeping her tone easy even as she avoids my gaze, and we both let it stand. “What about your office, the one that looks like a room where men get told bad news?”

“It’s a command center.”

“It’s a bunker with a desk.” She turns to face me. “When this is over, you’re going to need a room where you do ordinary work, and it can’t be that one. That one has a map of your enemies on the wall. You can’t answer a foundation’s email under a map of your enemies.”

She’s right, and the ease with which she says it, the assumption folded into it that there will be a foundation, an after, and ordinary work, gets to me more than anything she said in the guest room.

We end up in the kitchen, where I make coffee too strong for her and she adds hot water then drinks only a few sips. “I want to see the Amalfi house before it gets too hot,” she says, hooking one bare foot over the rung of the stool. “You’ve described it four times and I still don’t believe the lemon trees.”

“The lemon trees are real. The heat in July is also real.” I set the pot down. “October. Istanbul instead. You’d have the water and the markets and none of the tourists.”

“You keep trying to move me to Istanbul.”

“I keep trying to show you the good version of my life instead of the one with the guns in it.”