"Best ever."

"Looks like it."

I make a face at her. She smiles and returns to the crossword puzzle she's doing in the slow morning. Checking on the regulars, I move behind the counter and pull a sheet off the ticket pad.

My thoughts go briefly to my mother, and I resolve to call her tonight, after work. Simon's warning about not jumping the gun is at the back of my mind. I purposely didn't call her this past weekend for that reason. I ache to talk to her in depth for the first time in four years, to tell her where I am, how well Todd is doing, and about Petr.

I quell the urge and focus on the paper.

What I want to do with my life, I write. I sit, staring at the otherwise blank paper, cross out the starter sentence, and decide to do some brainstorming. The list eventually is named My Ideal Life.

Todd and Petr are the first two people I place on it, followed by a few of the skills I've picked up over the years. Waitressing is present, along with graphic design. Anton's projects reminded me of why I got into design in the first place, because I love the creativity the field allows. I have an artist's eye but not the ability to draw well.

I make two lists for what I want in my ideal life, tear up one and start a third. The only two constants are Todd and Petr. I can't feel upset, not after the incredible weekend that's left me sated, sore and exhilarated about the most important part of my life.

Sitting back around midmorning, I realize I don't really need to know today, either. It's not like I'm leaving town tomorrow and have to choose a new life. I have time to figure it out.

Except ... I'm anxious to catch up. I've got over four years to make up for missing time.

Preoccupied, I spend the better part of the day in pensive quiet. The business at the diner is slow enough that my journeys into my thoughts aren't a problem. I go through another five pieces of paper before resigning myself to the idea I'm not ready to figure it out yet.

Todd texts around three when he's off school and headed home. I glance at my phone to start the mental calculation about when he'll be home. With snow, it'll take a little longer for him to walk, so I'm guessing by four. I'm not too worried. By six, I'll feel relatively certain Simon's prediction of The Monster being in jail by the end of the day will be true. I'll check in with the attorney when I get home tonight then call my mom and let her know, if she doesn't already.

My evening plans are already set with Petr. The images in my head, coupled with the memories of his touch, make me sigh aloud.

It's dark by four. I text Todd to ask if he's home yet, and his response is a single word: almost. My excitement is growing about the end of the day, and I find it harder than usual to wait on people when I'm jittery, anticipating seeing Petr again.

"Hey, Claudia, you have a call," the second shift waitress calls from the phone located beneath the counter, near the entrance to the kitchen.

"Be right there!" I finish taking the order for the table where I am and then move away, checking the time. It's about four thirty. Assuming it's Petr, since I didn't think to give him my number, I accept the phone from her. "Hey, this is Claudia!" I say cheerfully.

"Hey, Claud."

I freeze. Every muscle in my body tenses, and for a moment, I can't breathe.

"Nice place. Didn't think you like the snow," Jake says.

His voice slides through me, pries open the lid of the box where my fear has gone, and places my chest in a vise.

"A little birdy tipped me off about the arrest. Fortunately, I was able to leave town in time."

"How did you find me?" I whisper hoarsely, turning my back to the dining area.

"Same little birdy. Todd called home on Christmas." He chuckles. "Always calls his grandma like a good boy. You know her phone's been tapped for a while."

Shit. I rack my mind and realize I told Todd the news about The Monster being put away but didn't warn him against calling home until it was done. Dread and guilt sink into me, and I realize I screwed up one last time.

"You seen Todd today?" he asks casually. "I have. Going to pick him up now."

"Stay away from him, Jake!" I snap.

"Not until we make things right between us," The Monster says calmly. "Look out the front door."

My stomach twisting, I manage to move my stiff body to face the door.

The Monster is outside, his lean form bathed in the light of the sign near the door.

It's him. He's here. There's no mistaking the face that's haunted my dreams for four years.

"Fine," I choke out the words. "Let's finish this between you and me. Leave him out of it."

"If I thought I could trust you, maybe." He moves away from the doorway.

I squint and move closer, watching him get into a car. Seconds later, the taillights glow red, illuminating the new fallen snow.

"Race you home," he says with a low laugh. "Whoever gets there first gets Todd."

"You don't know where we live."

"Apartment B, four thirteen Grove Street." He hangs up.

This can't be happening. Frozen in place, I watch his taillights exit the diner's parking lot.

From nightmare to fairytale to nightmare again. I can hardly breathe, and my only thoughts are on Todd and what happened the last time The Monster got a hold of my brother.

All but dropping the phone on the counter, I fish my cell out of my apron and dial Todd. He doesn't answer, so I text him with fingers shaking so badly, the spell check can't keep up with me. "Please be with Petr. Please be with Petr," I whisper, struggling to maintain my composure while typing. I have no reason to think he is. It's sheer desperation.

When I'm finished, I shove the door into the kitchen at full speed and dart to my locker. Whipping off the apron, I pause, eyes remaining on its crumbled form at the bottom of my locker.

Petr. If anyone can help me get Todd back, it's Petr.

Without a second thought, I bend and yank out his card with trembling fingers and dial his number. There's no answer, and I leave a message in such a breathless haste, I'm not sure what I say. I pull on snow boots, grab my coat, and then run.

Bursting out of the kitchen first and then the diner, I sprint, slipping and sliding in the snow and ice. The air soon grows too cold to breath and my vision blurred from tears and snow, but I push on, running with all my strength towards the apartment building seven blocks from the diner.

"Please be with ... Petr. Please be ... with Petr," I repeat over and over. I slam to my knees more than once, stand up, and continue, unable to think of anything but the memory of Todd sobbing in The Monster's arms with a knife at his throat. "Please ... god ... let him be with ... Petr!"

Chapter Nineteen: Petr.

Katya and I sit in the warm study where Baba spends a lot of his time either reading or managing business affairs. I'm nervous, but I don't exactly know why. Sawyer is present, seated away from the three of us, listening quietly.

The four days with Claudia hit me like a shotgun blast. Not that I didn't think she'd be the most incredible gift I'd ever be humbled enough to receive, but because she was so much more. It's left me rattled, a little worried I'm missing something crucial without my mind in the right gear, and generally overwhelmed.

Four days, and I can't stand the idea of so much as a weekend apart. Four days, and I'm questioning my sanity, because the emotions are far too intense when it comes to her. I prefer to act, not feel but I'm at a standstill. I thought her walls disappearing between us would make this easier, that sleeping with her would soothe the fire inside me instead of stoking it even higher.

My expectations and the reality are so different, I can't quite fathom how to handle it. Unable to think straight, I do what I always have: I turn to my family. If Mikael were here, I'd be sitting with him.

Katya is smiling. "How long have you know her?" she asks.

"Almost two months."

From the wicked spark in her eye, I know she's dying to say something I probably don't want to hear.

"I knew your mother three weeks," Baba reminds me.

"Technically you kidnapped her," I point out, familiar with the story of how my wealthy heiress of a mother fell into the presence of a rough-and-tumble KGB officer in Russia.

"Your mother exaggerated the story. She forced me to marry her. I was ready to let her go."

I laugh, and Katya rolls her eyes. Our mother had a temper worse than Katya's, and I suspect Baba is right about the story growing over time.

"She's not a bitch, but that's about all I know," Katya says somewhat reluctantly. It's a lot coming from her, and I understand I'll never receive a rave recommendation from my territorial sister about any woman I'm serious about.

"Your judgment is always spot on about people, Petr," Sawyer, the voice of reason, says from his spot observing. "What does your gut say?"

All of them are quiet, watching me. "That's the issue. All I have is my gut telling me to pull a Baba and kidnap her," I joke.

"It is not kidnapping if you end up married," Baba replies defensively.

"Shouldn't there be something else?" I press. "A little voice that tells me to think it over, to consider this, that and the other? I was with Brianna off and on for years, and I never got the green light from my gut."

"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.

I do, too. There's nothing wrong with my thinking. For the first time since the incident, my path is completely clear. Claudia is my future.

"Petr!" Katya's breathless cry comes from just outside the graveyard.

I stand quickly, hearing the alarm in her voice.

"Petr! Todd is having a seizure or something!"

I whisper a catch you later to Mikael and hurry out. Katya's in Sawyer's coat and breathing hard from her sprint through the thick snow. She waves for me to hurry and turns away, hurrying back to the house.

Concern flares within me. I beat her back and take the steps up the veranda two at a time then wait for her at the door to the kitchen. "Where is he?" I demand.

"Foyer!"

I picked him up after school today and brought him here before unleashing him to hang out with Riley, the SEAL from my old team, for a bit. I know Riley had plans at five and Todd was supposed to pick out which room upstairs he wanted for his own, since I suspect he and his sister will be here quite often from here on out.

When I reach the foyer, I see Sawyer with the kid. They're seated on the floor, Sawyer's hand on Todd's back and Todd's head between his knees. His breathing is shaky, his face blanched and his body shaking.