Her hand on her stomach. In the car before the raid, the brief touch she caught herself making, the movement I noticed and dismissed. After the warehouse, when she ordered a man's death, and her hand went to her abdomen and I thought it was shock. Every night in our bed, her palm resting where it rests now, the gesture I cataloged as habit. A hundred times. A hundred moments when she was telling me without words, and I couldn't hear it.
My forehead presses against her stomach. My hands find her hips. They're shaking. These hands that held a knife five minutesago and killed a man slowly and have never trembled in thirty years of violence are shaking against the body of the woman carrying my child.
"How long?"
"A few weeks. I found out before?—"
"Before I sent you away."
"Yes."
"You were pregnant." My voice breaks. The sound is unfamiliar. The crack of a man coming apart at a seam he didn't know he had. "And I packed your bag. And put you in a car. And sent you to a mountain where Viktor found you. You were carrying our child and I?—"
"You didn't know."
"I should have known. Your hand. On your stomach. Every night. I saw it a hundred times and I didn't?—"
She threads her fingers through my hair. The gesture from the night I cried in her arms. The gesture that means,I'm here. I'm holding you. Fall apart.
"You should have trusted me."
Five words. The thesis of this book. The summary of everything that broke between us and everything that has to change. Not: you should have been stronger, or smarter, or more strategic. You should havetrustedme. Given me agency. Treated me as a partner who holds information and makes choices instead of a variable to protect.
"I will. From now on. I swear to God, Siobhan. I will trust you with everything. Every decision. Every secret. Every choice. I swear."
"Good." Her hand in my hair. Her eyes bright. Steady and unsteady at once.
"Take me home, Nico."
"Yes, wife."
I stand. Pull her close. Careful. My hand finds her stomach. Rests there. Light. The first conscious touch of a man who now understands what he's touching.
"Together," she says.
"Together."
The word rebuilt. Not with ceremony or declaration but with two people standing in wreckage who broke a promise and are choosing to mend it and will keep mending it for the rest of their lives.
Across the factory floor, Cormac is directing the cleanup. He turns. Sees me rise from my knees. Sees my hand on Siobhan's stomach. The gesture is unmistakable.
His face cycles. Shock. Calculation. And then, briefly, before the mask of the eldest O'Brien brother reassembles itself, something soft crosses his expression. Something that might be joy if Cormac O'Brien were the kind of man who admitted to joy.
He nods. Once.
The way Cormac says everything that matters.
I take my wife's hand. We walk out of the factory together. The February air hits us. Cold. Clean. The sky above Springfield is black and starless and it doesn't matter because the woman beside me is alive and carrying my child and she saved my life with a chair and she's the bravest person I've ever known.
The war is over.
What comes next is probably going to be harder — learning to be a man worthy of what she's given me.
But I'll spend the rest of my life trying.
Chapter 36
Nico