Page 24 of My Wedding Night Massacre

There it is. Not a threat, because it doesn’t need to be. Just the facts, laid out plainly.

When I comply, I get Tuesdays. I get Thursdays. I get Sunday afternoons that I live for in a way that frightens me sometimes, the intensity of needing those hours, the specific joy of his small hands on my face, and the way he says Mama with the emphasis on the second syllable. Those days are what I hold onto when everything else is grey, flat, and going through the motions.

When I don’t comply, the Tuesdays move. The Thursdays get complicated. The Sunday afternoons become unavailable, something came up, maybe next week, the nanny mentioned he has a cold.

My father’s never said any of this out loud. He doesn’t need to. I figured out the rules a long time ago.

“What if I told Gachev the truth,” I say, not really asking a question. “What if I told him what this arrangement actually is.”

My father picks up his pen. Clicks it once. “David Gachev is a reasonable man,” he says, repeating his usual description of him. “He understands how families work. He wouldn’t be surprised.” He sets the pen down. “And it wouldn’t change Denis’s situation.”

I stand in front of his desk, and I feel the full weight of it, the cage with no bars, the family home that is held together entirely by a two-year-old boy who waits for me to go see him and doesn’t understand why I’m not always there.

“He drew a picture yesterday,” my father says. I hate him more in this moment than I’ve ever hated anything. “Nanny said it was supposed to be you. She said he worked on it for an hour.”

I close my eyes for one second. One long second, then I open them.

“What does he want me to say in the picture?” I ask, because I’ve learned the questions that move these conversations forward and the ones that don’t.

“Just mama,” my father says. “Apparently, that’s what he calls all his drawings of you.” He looks at me across the desk, and in his eyes there’s nothing, not cruelty, not satisfaction, not even the cold management of someone running a transaction. Just the absolute absence of anything that would make this feel like a conversation between a father and his daughter. “I might allow you to see him after the wedding. If you behave. If you do what you’re expected.”

I say nothing.

My father picks up his pen again and returns to his papers. “Is that all?”

I leave.

The corridor outside his office is the same corridor it’s always been, the same runner on the floor with the same frayed edge at the left side that no one has ever replaced. I stand with my back against the wall, my palms flat against the wallpaper, and I breathe. Breathing is the only thing I can control, and right now I need a semblance of control more than anything.

Three years ago, I stood in this exact spot after my father told me sentiment was a luxury I could no longer afford. I had nowhere to put what was inside me then either. I have nowhere to put it now. Some cages just get more familiar, their limits more thoroughly understood, their walls more invisible to everyone looking in from the outside.

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes for three seconds, then I push off the wall, straighten up, and walk down the corridor toward the kitchen where Nadia will be. Nadia is the only person in this house who will hold what I’m carrying without trying to fix it or use it, and right now that’s what I need.

All I have to do is obey my father and I’ll get to see Denis.

After the wedding, I’ll get to see my son.

17

Slava

I don’t sleep.

I came back to the villa at just past six in the morning, sat down at the operations table, and stayed there.

The photograph is in my jacket pocket. The jacket is on the back of the chair. I don’t take the photograph out again because I don’t need to. I have it memorized, the dark blond hair, the grey eyes, the shape of the face I know better than my own.

I hear Misha before I see him. His footsteps on the stairs at just past seven, which means he was awake when I came back in and made the decision not to say anything.

He comes into the room, takes in the untouched coffee, the jacket on the chair, my face, and sits down across from me.

“You went to see her,” he observes.

“I did,” I confirm.

He tilts his head to the side. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Not yet,” I say. “I need something from you first.”