"Katya." His voice through the door. Low, measured, carrying that same quality from last night, the one I still can't name. "May I come in?"
May I.
NotI'm coming in. Not the handle turning without warning, the way my father's hand always found the door before his voicefound the courtesy. A question. An actual question, requiring an actual answer, with the implicit understanding thatnois an option.
I look down at myself. The dress. The wrinkles. The six undone buttons at the back of my neck exposing a strip of skin I can't reach to either cover or reveal further. My hair is a disaster. My face feels tight and dry from hours of makeup I should have washed off.
I am a mess. A visible, undeniable, humiliating mess.
"Yes," I say, because what's the alternative? He'll see me at some point. Might as well be now, when I'm too exhausted for the mask to function properly and too uncomfortable to care.
The door opens and he steps inside.
He's changed. Grey trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to just below the elbow, no tie. His hair is slightly damp, which means he's showered, which means he had access to his clothes and a bathroom and the basic infrastructure of a normal morning, all of which feels unreasonably enviable right now.
His eyes find me on the bed and stop.
I watch something move through his expression, fast, almost invisible, but I catch it because I've spent my entire life reading faces for danger. It isn't pity. It isn't amusement. It's something heavier. Something that tightens the skin around his eyes and hardens the line of his jaw for exactly one second before the composure slides back into place.
He's looking at the dress.
He knows.
"I couldn't get it off," I say, because there's no point in pretending. My voice comes out flat, stripped of the careful modulation I usually maintain. I'm too tired for performance.
The silence that follows is brief but dense.
He crosses the room toward the wardrobe. Opens it, finds it empty because my suitcase is still packed at the foot of the bed, closes it again. Then he moves to the suitcase, crouches, and looks up at me.
"May I?"
Again with the asking. I nod, because speech is becoming increasingly difficult when the man keeps treating my belongings like they require permission to approach.
He unzips the suitcase and sorts through it with the efficient, unselfconscious practicality of someone who has packed and unpacked a thousand times. He finds a pair of jeans and a sweater, the soft grey one I packed because it’s comfortable, and sets them on the bed.
Then he straightens and moves behind me.
My whole body tenses. Instinct. Automatic. The kind of full-body brace that happens before the conscious mind can intervene, because my spine has learned that someone standing behind me is never good.
"I'm going to undo the buttons," he says. "Nothing else."
His voice is close. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath against the back of my neck where the six undone buttons have left a gap. My fingers curl into the bedsheet.
"Okay," I whisper.
His hands are careful. That's the first thing I register, the deliberate precision of his fingers as they find the seventh button and work it free of the loop. No fumbling. No impatience. Just steady, methodical progress down the line of my spine, each button released with a quiet efficiency that feels less like undressing and more like unlocking.
I stare at the far wall and try not to breathe too deeply.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
The fabric loosens incrementally across my ribs, and the relief is so immediate, so physical, that I have to press my lips together to keep from making a sound. I've been compressed into this dress for nearly twenty hours. The sensation of the bodice releasing its grip is almost dizzying.
Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't comment on the fact that his wife spent her wedding night buttoned into a dress she couldn't escape.
Twenty-five. Thirty.
