"Anton."
"Don't." The word is sharp. A warning.
I close my mouth. Stand by the counter with flour on my hands and watch my husband drink in the middle of the afternoon with that bruise darkening on his face and something ugly coiling behind his eyes.
He sets the glass down. Turns around. His gaze moves over me, the apron, the flour, the dough waiting on the counter, the kitchen that smells like yeast and butter and home. Something crosses his face. Something that looks, painfully, like contempt.
"What are you making?" he asks.
"Pirozhki."
"Of course you are." He leans against the counter and folds his arms. "What else would you be doing at two in the afternoon? Arranging flowers? Folding napkins? Organizing my cupboards into alphabetical order?"
The words sting. Not because of what he's saying, but because of how he's saying it. Cold and dismissive, like everything I've done this week is a joke to him.
"I'm making dinner," I say carefully. "The same way I've made dinner every night since I got here."
"Right. Because that's what you do. You cook and you clean and you smile and you sit across from me at the table with your hands folded and you never once ask a single question that matters." He pushes off the counter. Takes a step toward me. "Do you ever get tired of it, Kira? The performance?"
"It's not a performance."
"It's all a performance. Every meal. Every pressed napkin. Every time you bring me coffee without being asked, like some kind of programmed..." He stops himself. His jaw grinds. "They trained you well."
There it is again. That word. Trained. He spat it at me the first night, and it cut then too, but I absorbed it and moved on because that's what I do. That's what I've always done.
But something about today, about the contempt in his voice and the way he looked at the dough on the counter like it was beneath him, lights a fuse inside my chest that I didn't know was there.
"What is it you want from me, Anton?" I ask. My voice is steady. Barely.
"I want something real. Something that isn't polished and packaged and delivered on a silver tray. I want fire. I want a woman who pushes back, who fights, who has an opinion aboutsomething other than what's for dinner and whether the guest linens need rotating." He's close now. Close enough that I can see the muscle jumping in his jaw and the frustration burning behind his eyes. "I didn't want a wife. But if I have to have one, I at least want one with a backbone."
The fuse runs out and something detonates inside me.
"A backbone," I repeat, my voice dangerously low.
"Yes."
"You think I don't have a backbone."
"I think you have a very well-trained smile and a talent for making everything look perfect, and I think underneath all of that, I have no idea who you actually are."
The heat climbs my throat. My hands are shaking, and it's not fear or nerves. I realize with a sudden clarity, that it’s rage.
"You want to know who I am?" I say. My voice is different now. Accusatory and sharp. I don't recognize it and I don't care. "I'm the woman who left her family and everything she's ever known to marry a stranger because she was told to. I'm the woman who walked into your house with one bag and no idea if the man she married was going to hurt her or ignore her or worse. And instead of falling apart, I got up the next morning and I made you breakfast."
He opens his mouth, but I don't let him speak. I don’t think I could stop if I wanted to.
"I organized your kitchen because it was chaos. I stocked your pantry because you had nothing in it. I cleaned your house properly because no one else was doing it. I sat with you while you ate and I didn't push because you clearly didn't want to be pushed, and when you came home bleeding, I cleaned your wounds and I didn't ask a single question because I could see you weren't ready to answer them."
My chest is heaving. Flour shakes onto the floor every time I swing out a hand to punctuate my point, but I don't care.
"And you stand there and tell me I don't have a backbone? You tell me you want fire?" I step toward him. Close enough to feel the heat coming off his body. Close enough to see the shock breaking through that frozen expression. "I am the fire, Anton. I have been burning every single day in this house, holding it together, holding myself together, making something out of nothing because that's what I do. That's who I am. Not because I was trained. Because I chose it."
My eyes are stinging, but I blink it back. I will not cry in front of him. Not when I'm finally saying the thing I've been swallowing for a week.
"Being a wife doesn't make me less. Wanting to build a home doesn't make me weak. Cooking your meals and caring for you and sitting across from you at that table every night, that's not a performance. That's me. That's all of me. And if you can't see what's standing right in front of you, that's your failure, Anton. Not mine."
Silence.
