I took a private oath on the terrace when I touched her wrist and felt her pulse. Protect her without spectacle. Protect her without permission. Protect her in ways that look like common sense. It unsettles me because it is the opposite of the distance I have used to remain useful. I file the oath where I keep the other dangerous things. I don't lock it. I'm not that foolish.
Calls try to thread the night. Two go to voicemail because I'm standing within sight of six men who could decide a small war if they had the courage to. One I take. The number rings only when water is already in the room. A salt-streaked shed on the pier, a door that never answers the first knock. I ask three questions. Hear three truths. I tell the man not to touch anything that is under canvas until I count to six with him on the line. I count. He is a fast counter. I slow him down with my voice, and his pulse steadies. We are none of us saints. We are all of us boys handing each other the tools we did not have when we needed them.
A press photographer with a good tie but bad timing tries to catch Anatoly with the judge in the frame. I take one smooth step and put my shoulder in the way as if it were a mistake. Not the judge. He needs daylight between his robe and our table. The frame becomes a chandelier and thedonor wives. The photographer swallows a curse. I give him a smile that belongs in the museum of almost sincere. He nods because the rules are the rules. He will still get paid. He will still come back next year.
A quiet buzz at my hip. Misha again. He writes one word.Clear. Meaning Reznik is someone else's problem and will be back in his hotel with an ice pack and a story about stairs. The house breathes easier. I let myself breathe with it.
There are tells you learn in a room like this. The way mouths thin when they lie about charity. The way shoulders settle when deals conclude without signatures. The air changes when a knife walks in wearing a suit. I mark three men who touched their right cuffs within two minutes of each other and one woman who arrived unaccompanied and is never unaccompanied. Patterns are how you stay alive. Order is not a preference. It is a spine.
I feel the old weight like a hand between my shoulder blades. The orphanage taught me that no one will make a place for a child where he is allowed to set both feet. You carve it with the bone in your teeth if you have to. Anatoly opened a door when I was thirteen and saidcome inand pay me for the meal with your life,and I walked in because hunger makes saints of cowards. He taught me that oaths are more than a man's mouth. He stood me in a room with a chair under a bulb and told me to keep my voice outside the door unless I had to bring it in. He gave me war with no promise of making me the hero. I understand, although I don't forgive him for everything. I don't forgive myself for wanting the seat.
I'm circling back toward the west door when I feel it. The center of gravity has moved, like a hand on a glass settlingthe liquid without asking permission. Everyone here learns to feel it. The servants feel it first. Then the wives. Then the men who think they are kings. I turn and see Anatoly watching me. He lifts his chin a fraction. It is not a summons anyone else can see. I set my glass on a passing tray. I allow myself one glance at Valentina, because a weakness in me still believes it is strength, and then I cross the room.
It is past one, the dance floor already bare, the gardens still lit for the last stragglers. Anatoly's office at the back of the house is where real conversations happen. The door is heavy and old and has been opened only for the men allowed to pick up the city and examine it. I stand on the threshold and wait because that is discipline. Anatoly nods me in. The desk is a slab of wood that could be a monastery table if God had different ideas. There are two chairs, and they are for men who don't need more than wood and fabric.
Anatoly closes the door himself. The click is small and absolute. He pours two vodkas with the care a priest uses when he pours wine. He hands me one. He doesn't sit. He studies me the way he did when I was twenty and still angry at the wrong things. He considers, sets his glass on the edge of the desk, and says,"I want you to marry my daughter."
6
VALYA
Morning breaks like glass that almost decided to be kind. Light presses through the tall windows in clean squares and climbs the wall toward the ceiling medallion, where cherubs have been judging me since childhood. I lie very still in the center of the bed and let my body speak the truth before the mind begins its arguments. It always does when faced with happiness, hammering a list of reasons not to trust it. Yet, my mouth is tender. My pulse remembers hands it shouldn't.
The gala swims up in pieces—pearled branches glinting along the stairs, the room tasting like cedar, butter, and expensive promises. Memory pauses on Daniil's cologne arriving two seconds before his mouth, my own smile weaponized into diplomacy. And he, Dmitri, walking into the night as if it were a river he commands, the current bending to his stride, speaking in a voice that sets things back in their places.
My skin shivers under the duvet. I close my eyes to press back an unwelcome visitor from the past. Sometimes,memory taps like a polite stranger, asking if it may come in. I let it stand in the hall. Every time, my jaw locks until my teeth ache and my tongue tastes like old pennies.
Aleksandr and I talked as if we believed weather could be negotiated. It could not. He apologized, not late but strategic, busy with women and with a bride whose name bought him streets. Truth stood ankle-deep even as his mouth shaped promises while he measured me as a crest on a letterhead. I did what I could. I bought clove tea and walked home counting saints. He went to New York to be seen through glass and alliances. I stayed and learned to vanish on purpose.
A soft knock breaks my spell. Yelena slips in without waiting because she raised me. Privacy, in her theology, is something mothers grant, not obey. She sets down a tray with tea, orange juice, and a small bowl of honey cut with lemon. On her other hand is a folded linen napkin, the corner embroidered in blue thread by my grandmother, truth and the Mother's color, stitches neat as a prayer I only remember in honest light.
"Valya," she says, setting the tray on the little table by the window where the glass magnifies the world into something simple, "you sleep like you wrestled the wind."
"I did," I say into the pillow. She draws the curtains back with a practiced flick, and winter pours into the room without the cold. Bright sky, the kind of blue that believes in itself. No fresh snow, just yesterday's clean sheet untouched except for the small track of a cat who belongs to no one. A red bird, a cardinal, my grandmother would say, a messenger, hops on the bare branch and tilts its head at me like we have an agreement. The world is glitter and gold withoutpermission from any chandelier. For a moment, I can drink it.
"Tea," Yelena says. "And this juice will make you remember you like being alive."
"Later," I mumble and turn onto my back and stare at the ceiling and try to solve the equation of the night.He will not come back, I think, so my thoughts cannot break me.It meant nothing, I try, and the way my body answers that sentence makes me bite my lip. I'm too old to be naive and too young to be cynical, and somehow, I'm both. My mother's ghost chooses the moment to remind me that vows are iron fetters dressed as gold. I tell her, in my head, that I have made no vows.Not yet, she whispers back.
Yelena goes on with her usual inventory without looking like she is taking stock. She adjusts the throw at the bottom of the bed and notes, without comment, that my gown is draped over the chaise. She touches the crucifix at my throat like she is checking a clasp and not checking my soul, and her fingers smell like cedar and soap.
"You are quiet," she says. "That makes me nervous."
"I'm thinking about resurrections and how much the city likes them," I say. She lifts one eyebrow. "Fine. I'm thinking about last night." I scowl.
"The gala," she says, steady as an altar rail, her way of letting me borrow dignity until I can stand on my own. "It was successful. Your father did not frown. He was pleased."
"Mm."
"And your own night?" she asks, her tone light enough to float or sink depending on how I breathe.
"Frighteningly educational," I say. "don't ask for a syllabus."
"I wouldn't dare," she says, and then more gently, "I remember what it is to be young and strong and confused."
She leaves the tray and straightens a stack of books just to assert that order is available if I want it, and at the door, she pauses. "A bath would be good. I have spruce oil. It smells like a good winter."
"I will," I say, lying.
