Her confidence in me is everything. Her trust is everything. And I make a solemn vow to myself never to betray that trust again.
“I love you, Alyssa.”
She turns to me in shock. “What?” I ask, surprised by her reaction.
“You’ve never said that to me before.”
“Well… get used to it.”
She cups my face with the palm of her hand. “I love you, too, Uri Bugrov. It’s you and me now, okay? This is it.”
I disagree.
This isn’t “it.”
This is everything.
EPILOGUE: ALYSSA
“You’re sure?”
Emily nods reassuringly. “I wouldn’t be releasing this baby unless she was a hundred percent ready to leave the hospital. She doesn’t need us anymore, Alyssa. She needs you.”
My bottom lip trembles as I reach for my little girl. At almost five months, Zena is still small. She’s about the same size Katya was at three months. But she’s a good little feeder and her lungs are a force to be reckoned with.
She slides into the crook of my arm and I breathe in that baby milk smell that clings to her rosy cheeks. She opens her dark brown eyes, fixes them on me, and gurgles softly before breaking into a gummy, happy smile as though she knows we’re going home today.
“Are you ready, my little warrior?” I ask, looking down at her. “Are you ready to get out of here? Start some adventures with your sister?” She gurgles again and I kiss her head. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Uri steps to my side with Katya in his arms. She’s got a chubby hand clinging to his shirt like she’s scared someone will try and rip her from him.
“Look who it is, Katya!” I exclaim quietly. “Your twin sister.”
Katya babbles excitedly.
I glance towards Emily. “Thank you so much. You can’t know how grateful we both are for everything you did for the girls. And for me, too.”
She waves away my gratitude. “Please. It was my job.”
“It was Grigory’s job, too, and he betrayed us,” Uri growls with an anger rippling in his undertone that I don’t think will ever go away.
Emily’s face sours the moment Grigory’s name is mentioned. “He was a sorry excuse for a doctor,” she says in a flat monotone. “Lucky for us, he’s no longer here.”
I still haven’t asked Uri what happened to Grigory. I figured he disappeared the same way Boris Sobakin did—and honestly? I didn’t care. After what each of those monsters tried to do to my girls, they deserved their ends. The details of how they left this earth aren’t important to me.
“Go on now,” Emily encourages. “Take her home. And don’t stress out about every little thing. Babies are resilient. They’re made to survive new parents. You can do this, Alyssa.”
I smile nervously as Uri steers me towards the door. I know deep down that I can do this. It’s just that sometimes, reality is a lot more no-holds-barred than the picture you create in your head. Fantasies of becoming a mother are always sunlit and breezy and smell nice. The truth of motherhood is… a little bit less polished.
When we first brought Katya home, I spent every waking moment with her. I refused both a nanny and a night nurse in favor of doing it all myself. I suppose it was my guilt kicking in. I couldn’t be with one of my babies, so I compensated by being with the other one all the time.
Turned out, it wasn’t the healthiest plan. After a month of nonstop work, Uri had to sit down with me and force me to take a break.
“You can’t do this all by yourself, Alyssa. More importantly, you don’t need to.”
“I don’t want to rely on nannies—”
“I’m not talking about nannies; I’m talking about family. Polina is happy to babysit. So is Nikolai. Dimiv’s bringing his wife and kids over in a few weeks and I’m sure Dagmara will be overjoyed to pitch in as well. I can’t be the only one you allow to take her when you’re not around.”
I still didn’t listen. A week later, I fell asleep holding Katya and she slipped out of my hands. She’d been wrapped in a thick, fleece blanket, so there wasn’t so much as a single bruise on her perfect head. But she let me know I’d messed up. She wailed all the way to the car, all the way to the hospital, all the way from the parking lot to the building. Of course, she stopped crying literally seconds before we stepped into Emily’s exam room. I could almost swear she winked at me, that little sneak.
But it was the wake-up call I needed. After that, I got better at relinquishing control to other people. It turned out to be the best decision I could have made for both of us. Polly was madly in love with her new niece. Nikolai doted on her like every day is Christmas.