The courtyard at home is a winter chessboard, boxwood frosted, gravel crushed to sugar. I mean to cross it fast. I cannot. My father stands by the chapel door, a black silhouette cut out of winter. His coat hangs like it has seen storms and won. Opposite him stands a man in a fur collar, hollow cheeks, dark sunglasses in a gray afternoon, smoke leaking from his mouth. His vowels carry Chicago.
Two long coats hold position ten paces off. Hands in pockets. The hard shape of metal is unmistakable against wool. No one raises a voice, but cold strips the words and scatters them like ice dust. I don't intend to eavesdrop, and I will not announce myself. The yew hedge offers shadow, and I take it.
"Optics," the visitor says, the word dragged through his nose as if it were money. "Chicago cannot carry your optics anylonger, Anatoly. Old rites look quaint on Christmas cards. In boardrooms they look like weakness."
"Weakness looks like needing paper to stand," my father says, voice low and dry as winter dust. He coughs, a brief fit. When he straightens, he adds, quiet and clear enough to reach me, "The rites kept us when paper burned."
"The world likes to see a chair with a young back in it," Chicago says. "Boston is changing. Investors prefer clean hands. Your insistence on blood vows makes donors nervous."
"Investors like Grekov?" My father scoffs.
Gravel snaps under a shoe and then goes still. I slide deeper along the yew and the iron rose trellis. The canes are bare, but thorn and lattice break a silhouette better than leaves ever could. The men fall hushed. They never needed volume. One coat angles a look across the beds with the slow sweep of a man who counts sightlines. He doesn't see me. I know this garden's seams the way a seamstress knows bias. I keep to shadow and stone.
"People like him buy headlines," my father says. "Vows buy peace."
"Peace is expensive and doesn't scale," the visitor replies, as if discussing software licenses. "The families will not vote for a museum. They will vote for a modern house."
"The city speaks a new language," Chicago continues. "The bloc wants optics and predictability, Anatoly—clean headlines, clean sheets. Not crowns and candles."
He lets that settle, then adds, "And after you? Who takes thechair? Who holds the knife when the chair begins to wobble? Investors ask for succession, not incense."
My stomach locks so hard, I brace a palm against the coping.Knife.Daughter.Theater. The words taste bright and metallic. He is speaking of blood, of heirs, of a pageant they want filmed. My father doesn't look toward the hedge. He looks toward the chapel. He always does when he needs help he will not ask for.
"The chair will go to a spine that understands what keeps a roof on," he says, voice iron, neither mercy nor cruelty.
"And whose spine is that?" the man asks, too smooth. "Your health is not what it was. The city sees it."
"I tie my daughter to a man who understands vows," he says, his voice iron, neither mercy nor cruelty. "Old ways are not a costume here. They are a roof. I will not replace a roof with a brand."
"Then your roof will be pulled down around you," Chicago says, and there is nothing dramatic in it, only an accountant's grim satisfaction. "You are losing favor. Tradition is admirable from a distance. Up close, it looks like rust."
My father's breathing shortens for half a second. I know that sound as I know my own name. When he speaks, his voice is softer and more dangerous.
"Rust is a word men use when they want to sell a house they did not build," he says. "Tell your council this. If they want a younger spine to hold the chair, they will need to take it without God's blessing. We will see whether optics hold in hard weather."
Chicago's eyes flick toward the door, toward the cold, toward the hedge for one calculating heartbeat. He touches his collar, a man who likes his fur to be stroked, and offers a showroom smile with no pulse.
"Modernization or a quiet retirement," he says. "Consider which you prefer on your plaque."
He leaves with the efficiency of someone who likes to end conversations before they become scenes. The coats melt after him. My father stands very still, the chapel door to his right like a witness. He puts a hand flat on the stone. He looks older and more himself than he has in weeks. I want to go to him and say I heard everything, that I'm sorry, that I'm furious on his behalf. I want to tell him that I will be the roof as long as the roof doesn't turn me into a ceiling.
The sense lands like cold water. He is not trading me. He is roofing the house with my life. Dmitri is a roof he trusts to hold in a hard storm and a hand that will not sell the altar for paper. Where does that leave me? Pawn or daughter? He thinks protection is sacrifice. I carry the women in our line in my bones, and I carry a child now, small as a coin, already bending the path under my feet. If I choose these vows, I choose them as a crown I lift and not as a chain I accept.
I don't step out. He doesn't need my body as a shield. He needs me as a vow he did not coerce. I leave the hedge to the shadows it belongs to and slip into the chapel instead, a daughter returning to where the women in our line leave their honest fear.
The warm air reminds me of beeswax and old wood. I light the lamps to hold their steady little flame. The icons listenthe way they always do, without judgment and without indulgence. I bow, cross myself as I was taught, brow so I remember to think, chest so I remember to love, shoulder and shoulder so I remember I'm held. Then I light a taper. One for my father's breath. One for Dmitri's hands. One for the small life I'm hiding from both of them because my courage is not as obedient as my mouth.
My voice is rough when I try the line. I clear it, and it behaves.To bind my fate to his. The Slavonic follows, slower, older, the consonants like river rock, the vowels like open windows. When I first read it, the words looked like a knife disguised as lace. Today, they are a lifeline in hard water.
I lay my palm flat on the Gospel and don't ask for permission to be strong. I ask for the patience to be honest in rooms where honesty is not a currency anyone respects. I look at the Mother and say without words that I'm trying to be both a good daughter and my own person, two desires that have always shared a bed uncomfortably.
Outside, footsteps cross the stone. A guard coughs into his sleeve. Somewhere in the house, a door closes with a hush that is too careful to be an accident. The city holds its winter like a balance on a sharp knife. I take the quiet with me when I rise, and I take the heat of the little lamp in my hands until my skin remembers it is not made only of alarm.
I choose the long corridor to my rooms because I want to pass the windows where the light falls in hard bars. On the landing, a housemaid is polishing a banister with attention that counts as prayer. We exchange the smallest of nods. The world is lurching, and yet it lists. The brass still wants to shine. I find that comforting in a way that makes me laugh at myself under my breath.
My door is unlocked, which in this house is ordinary. Dmitri's men hold a dignified distance in the hall. The locks have been changed twice this week, the cylinders rekeyed and tested, and the motion alarms tuned so drafts don't masquerade as danger. I'm meant to feel safe, and most days, I do. Today, a different awareness rides the room, the sense of being watched the way a cat watches from the top of a bookcase, a presence with claws, not hostile, only patient.
The room is tidy, the kind mothers teach when God notices a made bed. The chair by the window holds the throw my grandmother embroidered in red and black—wheat and birds.The Book of Vowslies where I left it. I sit and open it, and the handwriting looks different to me now, less like instructions, more like a map with the dangerous shoals circled in pencil by a hand you trust.
