Tobias was not asking me hopefully.
He was asking carefully, the way he did everything, weighing a stranger who had appeared in his exhausting day and knelt down on a rug and started to cry.
He wanted the facts before he decided how to feel about them.
He was, I realized, exactly like me — the careful one, the one who needed to understand the shape of a thing before he trusted it — and something about seeing my own guardedness looking back at me out of a six-year-old’s face, my own instinct to verify before I hoped, undid the last of whatever composure I had left.
Chapter 23 — Just Stay
The tears came then, finally, all six years of them at once, running down my face in front of my children.
I looked up at Yelena, and her own tears were falling now, freely, unhidden for the first time since I’d walked back into her life that afternoon.
“If your mom says it’s all right,” I said to Tobias, to all four of them, my voice barely working, “then I am going to spend the rest of my life being your dad.
Every day.
I’m not going to disappear.
I promise you that.
I am done disappearing.”
Yelena looked down at me on my knees on the floor of that cold beautiful apartment, and for a long moment she didn’t say anything, and I understood that six years of survival do not dissolve in an evening, that trust broken that badly is rebuilt slowly or not at all, and that whatever came next would have to be earned across years, not won in a night.
I was prepared to spend those years.