Page 17 of My Wedding Night Massacre

My father’s phone buzzes during the second course. He glances at the screen, and something shifts in his face, not urgency exactly, more like opportunity recognized.

“Forgive me,” he says, already pushing back his chair. “Baladin. I won’t be long.”

He leaves without waiting for a response.

The room is quiet for a moment. I look at my plate. David looks at his.

“You don’t have to make conversation,” he says. “I’m aware this isn’t a situation either of us would have designed.”

I look up at him. “Most men in your position don’t say things like that.”

“Most men in my position are trying to sell you something,” he says. “I’m not interested in selling you anything.”

I study him for a moment, looking for the angle, for the version of this that resolves into a familiar shape. He looks back at me without filling the silence, which is either confidence or patience. I haven’t decided which.

“What are you interested in?” I ask.

“Information,” he says. “And time. Which I suspect you’re also short on.”

It’s so direct that it takes me a moment to process it as directness rather than a strategy. My father’s men are never direct. They approach things obliquely, layering meaning under meaning, saying one thing while building toward another. David has just told me plainly that he knows what this is and has no intention of pretending otherwise.

I don’t know what to do with that.

“Eight days,” I say, because it’s accurate and I want to see what he does with it.

“Eight days,” he agrees. He picks up his wine glass, looks at it, then sets it down. “I was married for twenty-two years. My wife died four years ago.” He says it as if placing a simple fact in the room. “I’m not looking to replace what that was. I want to be clear about that.”

I look at him. “Then what are you looking for?”

He considers this with what seems like genuine consideration rather than the pause that’s covering a prepared answer. “An arrangement that’s honest about being an arrangement,” he says. “A household that functions. Someone who won’t pretend, because I’ve found pretending exhausting and I have enough years left that I’d rather spend them differently.”

It should be clinical. It is clinical. And yet there’s something in the plainness of it that I find less offensive than everything else I’ve been handed in the last three years, all the warmth that was management, all the care that was leverage, all the love that was a transaction dressed up in better clothes.

He isn’t pretending to offer me more than this. That’s new.

My father comes back with his phone in his hand and his attention already back in the room.

“Baladin sends his regards,” he says, settling back into his chair, picking up his fork like the interruption was a punctuation mark rather than a gap. “Now, the reception venue. David, I wanted your thoughts on the Krasnov ballroom.”

David sets down his wine. “It’s appropriate,” he says.

“Good.” My father looks satisfied, which means the call was what he needed it to be. The conversation moves forward. David slips back into his polite engagement without any indication that the last four minutes happened. I slip back into mine.

In the car, Nadia doesn’t ask. She looks out the window, and I look out mine.

I think about the way David looked at me over the dinner table. Not the inventory look, not the value-assignment look, not any of the looks I’ve been cataloging from men in my father’s orbit for three years. The look of someone trying to read a person rather than a position. The look of someone who has already accepted the transaction and is trying to understand who he’s transacting with.

It wasn’t warmth. It wasn’t want. It looked almost like recognition, and I don’t know what to do with that either.

One thing I do know for sure is that eight days of so-called freedom is all I have left.

13

Slava

“Four days,” Misha says, tapping the calendar on the table. Not for my benefit. He knows I know. He’s saying it because he wants me to hear it differently than I’ve been hearing it. He wants me to process and accept it.

“I know,” I say.