I would have promised her anything.
And I want to be honest about that, because a lie of the neat and tidy kind is exactly what got us into this, and Yelena deserved better than a neat ending.
It was not fixed that night.
How could it have been.
She had spent six years believing I’d had her threatened out of a hospital bed, and learning in one evening that it was my mother and not me did not simply erase six years of a body braced against my whole world.
There would be months of her flinching when my phone rang.
There would be nights she couldn’t quite let me hold the boys without watching.
There would be a long, patient, unglamorous stretch of me proving, one kept promise at a time, that I was safe now, that I would not disappear, that the world that had taught her to trust no one with money had been wrong about me even if it had been right about nearly everyone else in it.
I knew all of that, kneeling there.
I welcomed it.
Because the alternative — the tidy version, the movie version where the truth comes out and all the damage instantly heals — was just another lie, and we had both nearly died of lies.
What we had instead was harder and realer: the beginning of something that would have to be built slowly, out of days, by two people who had been robbed of six years and were not going to be robbed of the rest.
I would take the slow, real thing.
I would take a lifetime of earning it.