The room was quiet.
I looked at Declan.
He looked back with the expression of a man who had nothing more to add because everything necessary had been said, and the rest was up to me.
“I’ll replace the vase,” I said.
“Jared.”
“I’ll take her advice.”
I had my jacket from the hook by the door and was through it before he could say anything further. Behind me I heard the quiet sound of him refilling his glass and the even quieter sound of the back hallway door opening again, Marissa returning from wherever she’d retreated to, and then I was in the corridor and moving and the door closed behind me and I was already running the next steps before the elevator arrived.
She had said goodbye.
She had meant it.
I was going to be deeply inconvenient about that.
Chapter 17
Polina
I did not sleep.
That wasn’t entirely true. I had drifted somewhere between two and four, the shallow unrestful place that wasn’t sleep so much as a brief suspension of consciousness and had come back from it to the same locked room and the same locked truth and the same ceiling I had been staring at since my father’s footsteps had receded down the corridor.
My mother had been twenty-nine when she died.
I was twenty-four.
I had lain in the dark and done the arithmetic and let it mean what it meant and then I had gotten up at five-thirtyand showered and dressed with the deliberateness of someone preparing for something they intend to see through. Not armor exactly. I had spent too many years treating composure as armor and the armor had its limits and I had found them last night on the floor of this room. This was something different. This was the clarity that came after the worst kind of truth had finished arriving and you were still standing and you understood, with a certainty that had no room in it for performance, exactly what you were going to do next.
I was going downstairs.
I was going to tell my father no.
The thought of it was not frightening. That was the thing I kept returning to as I sat on the edge of the bed and watched the city come pale and gray through the curtains—the absence of fear. I had been afraid of him for so long that the fear had become structural, load-bearing, so built into the architecture of my daily life that I had stopped distinguishing it from the air. And then last night he had told me about my mother with a silence that was louder than any words, and something in the architecture had simply… given way. You could not be afraid of a man you had already seen all the way to the bottom of.
I knew what he was now.
I went downstairs at eight after Dimitri unlocked the door.
He was in the dining room. Coffee, phone, the morning papers arranged with the precision of a man for whom even small rituals were a form of control. He looked up when I entered and his expression was the one I had been expecting. The patient one, the one that assumed a night of reflection had produced the correct result and was waiting for me to confirm it.
I sat down across from him.
“I won’t marry Roman Davidof,” I said.
No preamble. No good morning, no careful approach, no layering of context to soften the landing. I had spent twenty-four years using language as cushioning and I was finished with it.
He set his phone down.
“Polina.” The patient tone. The one that treated my refusal as a symptom rather than a position. “You’re upset. Last night was difficult. I understand that. But you will see when you’ve had time to—“
“I won’t,” I said. “I’ve had time. I’ve had the night and I’ve been awake for most of it and my answer is the same at eight in the morning as it was when you locked my door. No.”
Something shifted in his face. The patience thinning. Beneath it, not rage, not yet, something that was the precursor to rage in a man who had spent decades training himself not to show it. The thing underneath the cold face. The actual man.
