Soldier Mine (Sons of War #2)(55)
“There’s your answer,” Katya says. “Brianna was sleeping with Mikael and you and god knows who else.”
“Let us test your gut.” Baba stands and crosses to his desk. “Come, Petr.”
“Baba, he needs more than a coin toss!” Katya objects.
“Stay, Katya.”
I snort and rise, following my father to his desk.
“When Katya married Sawyer, she gave him your grandfather’s wedding ring to welcome him to the family,” my father starts. “You remember?”
“Of course.”
“I was saving this for Mikael, since he was the older of you boys.” Baba pulls a small, velvet jewelry pouch from his desk. “To test your gut. Answer the question: does this change your mind?”
“Are you flipping rare coins this time?” I smile, familiar with his techniques for helping us make decisions as kids. Whatever our intuition told us when the coin’s face was revealed was the truth, according to Baba.
“Not coins.” He dumps the contents of the pouch into his hand and closes his fist before I can see it. “What is the question?”
“I got it, Baba,” I say, amused. “Does this change my mind. We’ve played this game for years.”
“Except, today, it’s not a game.” Baba opens his fist to reveal what he’s holding. “Answer quickly,” he orders.
I stop breathing for a moment, my heart taking off. “No. It doesn’t.” No part of me objects. If anything, the choice seems even simpler.
“How does it feel?”
“Right. Natural.”
“There it is then. Decision made.” He appears pleased. He replaces it in the pouch and hands it to me. “Now go tell your brother.” His work done, my father returns to his place at the hearth with Katya, who’s waiting curiously to hear what’s going on.
The familiar sense of flying towards a mission comes over me: exhilaration mixed with the kind of calm, brutal clarity fueled by adrenaline. It causes the world to slow down to the point where I can take in every last detail of my environment before the chaos of a mission erupts. I open the pouch once more and remove its single inhabitant.
My mother’s engagement ring. It’s plain considering her wealth, bought for her by a man on a soldier’s budget in a country and time where luxuries such as this probably cost him a year’s wages at least. She was buried with her wedding ring, I knew, but I never considered her engagement ring or that Baba was saving it for Mikael’s bride.
Understanding his intention gives the simple solitaire even more importance. Baba had met all my girlfriends and Mikael’s over the years and never once mentioned this. He knows what I do: that the right person makes all the wrong ones seem so obviously incompatible, it’s painful. It’s moments like this when I don’t doubt my father was a damned good spy chief capable of assessing a person like no other.
Stuck in the moment of clarity, I grab my sweatshirt and shrug into it as I leave the study for the backyard. Five generations of my mother’s family are buried in the garden-sized, private cemetery surrounded by snow-topped hedges. It’s cold and dark, somewhere around four thirty. The back lawns remain well lit from the holiday weekend, and I trudge through the snow. More snowflakes build in my hair and soon, the skin of my head is cold.
I open the freezing iron gate of the graveyard and enter. There are footsteps leading to Mikael’s grave. Katya comes here daily when she’s in town to talk to him and Baba at least two to three times a week. I tend to drop by after long runs, about four times a week. It’s when I miss him the most. We worked out together every day throughout high school, college and when stationed close enough to run together in the military. We always talked during those times about whatever was going on in our lives, how irksome Katya could be, and who Baba was trying to set us up with that week.
Standing before his tombstone, I reach into my pocket to touch the pouch and smile. Baba’s gut test is twofold, and I know it. First is to see my reaction when he handed me the ring. The second: what I tell Mikael. It’s not possible to lie at the grave of someone you love. This is where Katya came when she and Sawyer became serious, and Sawyer came to tell Mikael as well how he felt about my sister.
I brush the snow off the top of his tombstone and crouch. I don’t normally speak when I’m here, just … think. Or maybe, speak to him silently the way we used to while running.
This weekend filled in many of the gaps I had about Claudia. We spoke for hours upon hours about everything from our families to favorite movies to pet peeves and turn-ons. Without her barriers, she turned into the kind of woman I glimpsed through our interactions at the diner: kind, sweet, spirited without a drop of malice, affectionate, honest and genuine to the core. She loves to laugh and equally to tease, and in bed she shows the same spirit of adventure, endearing consideration and generosity she does outside.
She reacted with compassion rather than pity or revulsion to my leg. Her tears and desire about wanting to take away my pain still touches me to the point I’m left speechless whenever I stop to savor the memory and recall the expression on her face.
Even the voice of insecurity has nothing to say about how I feel for her.
“She’s kinda perfect,” I tell Mikael, unable to help my smile. There’s no other way to say it, nothing left to explain. Mikael would know what that means.