Page 76 of 10 Days to Surrender

I’ll take it.

“Let me help you get ready for bed,” Mama says once the dishes have been cleaned, in that tone that means it’s not really a request. It’s so achingly familiar that I can’t refuse.

We go upstairs, arm in arm. She sits me at the vanity, just like when I was little, and begins brushing my hair. The repetitive strokes are soothing, almost hypnotic. Each stroke of the silver brush pulls me backward—toward princess braids before school plays, to nights just like this one. All the tiny little moments of normality woven in between the darker chapters.

“You used to yelp when I hit a snarl,” she murmurs, working through a knot at my nape. Her reflection smiles in the vanity mirror. “Remember?”

“I don’t miss those detangler tears,” I laugh. The scent of her almond oil makes my throat ache. You don’t realize how much you’ve missed a thing until you get to have it again, however briefly.

That almond oil scent lingers even after she sets the brush down. But when her hands go still on my shoulders, I catch her watching me meaningfully in the mirror. She touches a fading bruise beneath my collarbone. “What kind of tears are we crying these days, sweetheart?”

My knuckles whiten in my lap. “Can we not?—”

“You love him.” Not a question.

I focus on the vanity’s nicked wood. “What I feel doesn’t matter. This… arrangement… It’s temporary.”

Her sigh ribbons through the silence. “Oh, Ariel. When have you ever been good at temporary?” The brush resumes its path, gentler now. My scalp prickles where her gaze lingers. “Hearts want what they want, dear. Even when our heads screamno.”

“What if my heart’s an idiot?”

Her laugh is warm, familiar. “Then you’ll be in excellent company.” The brush glides through a final snarl. “We’re all fools for love in one way or another. The trick is deciding whether to fight it, or let it make you brave.” She kisses my head. “I know what you are. Sleep well, my brave girl. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She shuffles off down the hall. I hear Jasmine’s door open and their two voices start to flow together. They keep going, a comforting melody layered on top of the croaks and groans of the old villa.

The sheets are cool against my sunburnt shoulders as I slip into bed. Mama laughs at something Jasmine says—that deep belly laugh I haven’t heard in so long.

Through the window, more sounds float in. Zoya and Sasha, out in the courtyard, murmuring in Russian, like a bass line to the song of all my loved ones being here.

I press a palm to the swell beneath my ribcage. The twins kick in stereo—left side, then right—as if they’re as warm and fuzzy as I am.

What if my heart’s an idiot?

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Right now, though, it’s hard to be anything but happy as sleep lowers me down into dreams that don’t feel awfully different from how reality went today.

29

SASHA

The cracked sundial in the villa’s garden is off by exactly eighteen minutes. I’ve been timing it against my watch since dawn.

I’ve been timing other things, too.

Three hours since I left her bed.

Seven weeks until the babies come.

Time used to move like bullets—straight, precise, predictable. Now, it’s all chaos, stretching and compressing around Ariel’s smile, her laugh, the soft sigh as she comes in my arms, while the villa, full of life, does a sigh of its own all around us.

Just sex, we keep saying.

It’s getting harder and harder to believe.

The tap of Zoya’s cane against stone announces her arrival. She’s dressed for war in gardening clothes, her silver hair tied back with what looks suspiciously like one of Kosti’s old bandanas.Oh, fucking Christ.If she and him start shacking up, I’ll nuke the planet and tell God to start over.

“These silly girls,” she mutters in Russian, jabbing her cane at various spots in the turned earth. “No sense of proper spacing. No understanding of drainage. Who taught them to plant like this—wolves?”

“They seemed enthusiastic.”

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