Page 26 of My Wedding Night Massacre

Misha sets the laptop down slowly. He looks at me across the table, and I can see him deciding, the same decision he’s been making since Palermo, whether to follow where this leads or whether to pull me back before I go somewhere that can’t be undone.

“What are you going to do?” he asks. “About the wedding.”

“I don’t know yet,” I say.

“Slava.”

“I don’t know yet, Misha. That’s the honest answer. I might wait for what you find, or I might decide before that.”

Two days until the wedding. The Napoli crew comes tomorrow. The wedding’s on Friday. A child with grey eyes is somewhere in a house I can’t touch yet.

Misha makes the calls, doing the research I asked him to. I wait for him to find something that will either confirm everything or destroy the version of events I’ve been living inside for three years.

I’ve been wrong before. I’ve been wrong about things that mattered less than this.

18

Pavlina

I wake before Nadia comes, lie on top of the covers in the grey morning light, and don’t think.

Thinking is too dangerous today. I learned that in the weeks leading up to this, the way certain thoughts open doors I can’t close again in time to function. So I breathe, look at the ceiling, let myself be exactly nothing for as long as I can hold it.

The dress is on the hanger on the back of the door. I’ve been aware of it since I woke up, the way you’re aware of something in your peripheral vision you’ve decided not to look at directly. Ivory. Beautiful. It will do its job regardless of what’s happening inside it.

At seven, I catch Nadia’s footsteps on the stairs. She opens the door, the smell of coffee in her hands filling me with energy I so desperately need. She’s silent. She knows what today is and what it means. She understands that there are no words that could make it better.

I sit up.

She sets the coffee on the nightstand, looks at me, looks at the dress, then looks at me again. Her eyes soften for one second, just one, then they settle back into the steady warmth she’s always given me. The warmth that doesn’t ask anything, doesn’t require me to be anything other than what I am right now, which is a woman sitting on the edge of a bed in yesterday’s clothes, trying to find the shape of the next eight hours.

“Come,” she says, touching the chair at the vanity.

I obey.

She starts on my hair. I look at my own face in the mirror, trying not to recognize it. The face looking back has been getting ready for things it didn’t want to do since long before today. It knows how to hold still, how to arrange itself into whatever version my father needs me to be, how to find the public distance in the eyes. I watch it do that now, the subtle shift, the whole apparatus of performance clicking into place.

Nadia’s hands are steady, sectioning and pinning, the room quiet except for the city outside and the sounds of the house below. I think about Denis. I think about what his voice sounds like in the morning, the way he grabs my face with both hands when I pick him up, palms flat against my cheeks, like he’s making sure I’m real. I think to myself that I just need to get through this day and I might get to see him. Father promised me as much.

Our eyes meet in the mirror.

Nadia holds my gaze, doesn’t look away. Not with pity, not with the soft-eyed grief that would break me open if I let it, just with witness. Pure, unwavering witness.

She wordlessly communicates, “I see you. I know what this is. I know what you’re doing and I know why. I’m not going to pretend otherwise or make you explain it.”

Her hands keep moving in my hair without pausing, eyes steady on mine, the refusal to look away the kindest and most devastating thing she could have done.

I look away first. I always do.

She helps me into the dress and does the buttons at the back one by one with careful, gentle fingers. I stand straight, look at the wall, and breathe. When she finishes, she rests her hands on my shoulders for just a moment, barely a second, then steps back.

I turn to the mirror again.

The woman in it is wearing an ivory dress, hair up, face arranged into a mask my father likes. She looks like a bride, looks exactly what she’s supposed to look like. Three years of practice, it stops requiring effort and starts requiring the effort of remembering you’re doing it at all.

“You look beautiful,” Nadia says.

I look at the mirror a moment longer, at the woman who is going to walk into a church in an hour and sign her name to something she didn’t choose, who is doing this because the alternative costs more than she has. This is what love looks like when everything else has been taken away. It looks like this. It looks like putting the dress on and walking out the door.