“Love.” She says it like it’s a foreign word, one she understands but does not trust. “If you love him, you will do what is necessary to protect him and his family. This is the offer on the table: call off this… experiment of a marriage, marry Maxim, and I will personally ensure Dr. Markov accepts Mr. Easton into his trial, and I’ll even throw in the cost of it as a show of my good faith and your dedication to our family,” she says as if the cost of it is nothing. Which for my grandmother, it is nothing. “Or refuse, and I will respect your decision to stay married to Scottie. I’ll speak to your father. I will tell him to leave you here in Seattle, with your hockey husband. I’ll have him remove any financial or legal pressure from you. You will be free to pursue this life, though you will be disinherited.”
Hope lances through me so sharply it almost hurts. I don’t care about the money. I just want Scottie—I want this life with him. “You would really do that?”
“Yes,” she says. “If you refuse this offer, this is my promise: I will not drag you back to Russia. Your father’s leverage over you will end.”
My heart jumps.
Free.
Fully free to stay with Scottie. To dance in Seattle. To be part of his family. To build something real.
It’s everything I’ve wanted since the moment I stepped off that plane and realized there was another path.
“But.” Her voice turns colder. “If you refuse, I will not speak to Markov. I will not attempt to influence his list. From what I understand, he has no intention of adding Mr. Easton. The injury is old. The waiting list is long. The odds are not favorable.”
My stomach twists.
“So,” she says gently, like she’s offering me another cup of tea and not a moral guillotine. “Do you want freedom… or do you want to save the man you love from watching his father’s body fail him?”
“That isn’t fair,” I choke out.
“Life is rarely fair, milaya moya.”My dear.“I am giving you something most people never get: a choice.”
A choice that is not a choice at all.
Images flood my mind too fast to process.
Scottie, laughing in the kitchen with sauce on his cheek. Scottie, carrying me over the threshold. Scottie, in Whitefish, spinning his cousins’ kids around. Scottie, whisperingI love youagainst my mouth as he moved inside me, gentle and confident. Scottie, staring out at the lake, talking about his father’s accident with that quiet, raw ache in his voice.
“If I say yes,” I say hoarsely, “if I agree to divorce Scottie and marry Maxim… you’ll get his father into the trial?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “I will call Markov personally. His assistant is already arranging it and waiting for my call but if I don’t call by tonight, they will send the last spot to the first choice on the waitlist, and it won’t be him.”
“And if I say no… you’ll tell Papa to leave me alone.”
“Yes. But you must pick one, and you must pick it now, or else the doctor’s offer goes away.”
It’s ruthless the way only honesty can be.
I stare out the window. Seattle slides past––steel, glass, rain-streaked sky.
I think of the Eastons’ kitchen, the smell of cinnamon rolls, the way Hillary wiped her hands on a dish towel and hugged me like her own. The way Arnold joked, calling my husband their golden boy with so much pride it nearly split my chest.
I think of Scottie rubbing my feet after a long night of dancing, of the theater he rented for me, of telling me that he would have agreed to marry me if Luka had just been honest from the start.
He would never take a deal that sends me back to Russia.
He would stay. Fight. Refuse to give me up even if it cost him everything.
I know that as surely as I know the positions in a barre exercise.
Which means… if this is going to happen, it has to be me.
I have to be the one who walks away.
My eyes sting.
“I’ll do it,” I whisper.
