But Iris is right about the other thing too. Anya is putting on her mother's dress tomorrow. She's standing at an altar and handing me her future. And I've given her nothing in return except a proposal that sounded like a dare and four days of grunting over coffee.
She deserves better than that.
I’m an ass.
I head to my room and take a shower. Change into a clean shirt, dark blue, the one Iris bought me last Christmas that I've never worn because I don't go anywhere that requires it. I look in the mirror for the first time in months because I need to check that I don't have toothpaste on my face or something equally stupid.
The scar stares back at me. The dead eye. The jaw that's too square and the brow that's too heavy and the mouth that doesn't know how to smile without looking like it's threatening someone.
I turn away from the mirror and head down to the conservatory, where I know Anya is curled up reading a novel from one of Ma’s many book shelves.
"Anya.” Her name still feels warm in my mouth, but foreign, like it doesn’t quite fit the shape yet.
She looks up from the page, resting her finger where she has read up to, and smiles so fully that my chest swells a little.
"Hi," she says, dropping her feet to the floor and sitting up.
"I thought we could go for a walk. Just around the estate."
She looks past me, dragging her bottom lip between her teeth as she takes in the way the sun is setting quickly behind the tree line. For a moment I think she is going to say no.
Then, the corners of her mouth lift. “I’d love to.”
She heads out of the conservatory into the foyer, where she pulls on her coat, the one from the night she arrived, and zips it up against the cool spring air. She slides her feet into her sneakers and turns back to me.
“Ready,” she says. Her eyes glitter. She seems…excited…to be spending one on one time with me, and I could get used to the way that makes me feel.
I pull open the front door and lead her down the steps and onto the gravel path that will take us through the trees and down towards the lake.
To my absolute shock, she slides her hand into mine. I look down at our entwined fingers and then back at her, to find her grinning like someone who did something brave and got away with it.
“Tell me about you,” I say, wanting to hear her voice. Her story.
She tells me about growing up with Diomid. How he used to carry her on his shoulders through the garden when she was small, how he taught her to play chess and then got furious when she started beating him. She tells me about her mother, carefully, like she's handling something fragile. How Marinaused to sing while she cooked, Russian lullabies that Anya still hums sometimes. How the house went quiet after she died, and how Diomid filled the silence by becoming the kind of man who controls everything because he couldn't control the cancer.
"He loves you," I say.
"I know. He just loves me in a way that looks a lot like a cage sometimes." She bends over and plucks a pine cone from the ground. "That's why I ran here. Not because I don't trust him, but because trusting him and being trapped by his protection aren't the same thing."
I understand that more than she knows. The Orlov men love fiercely and protect violently and sometimes the line between keeping someone safe and keeping them prisoner disappears entirely.
"He was right to be angry," I say. "The Baron could have had men on that road."
"Yes. And I did it anyway." She looks at me. "Are you going to lecture me about it?"
"No,” I laugh a little, because the thought of lecturing her seems ridiculous. “I'm going to remember that my wife is the kind of woman who runs toward the dangerous thing instead of away from it, and plan accordingly."
Something shifts in her expression. Something warm. "That's the first time you've called me that."
"Called you what?" I ask, confused.
"Your wife."
I didn't realize I'd said it. But the word sits between us in the darkening sky, real and solid, and I don't take it back.
Anya moves a little closer.
We walk side by side, the gravel crunching under our feet. The house is dark behind us, warm light in a few upstairs windowsbut otherwise still. The world feels small out here. Just the garden and the sky and the woman beside me.
