Page 27 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“Thank you,” I say.

My father is in the foyer when I come downstairs. Suited, freshly shaved, with an energy this morning that’s different from his usual contained authority, something looser, more expansive. He looks at me from the bottom of the stairs, confirms that what he sees matches what he expected, and nods once. That’s the whole of his response to his daughter in a wedding dress. A fucking nod.

“The car is ready,” he says.

“I know.”

He straightens his cuff with the unhurried movements of a man who has nowhere to be but exactly here, who has been building toward exactly this morning for three years. There’s something almost theatrical about his composure, the way he carries it today, wider than usual and somehow settled deeper. This is his day. He built this. The Gachev alliance, the Lyubimtsev name at the center of the city’s power structure, the whole thing assembled on foundations he laid himself. Today it gets sealed, and the knowing of that has changed something in him, a pride that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with what he’s made.

The church is everything he wanted. Grand, full, two hundred people dressed in their best clothes, politicians in the front rows, businessmen behind them, the whole elite of New York’s power dressed up for the occasion. My father moves through the entrance with ease, eyes moving across the pews like he’s checking inventory. He greets three men near the entrance, clasping hands, saying names, performing the version of himself that this room requires. I stand beside him, smile the smile he wants, say the right things to the right people, run my own performance alongside his.

He’s in his element. Every handshake, every name said warmly, every satisfied glance at the rows filling up. I watch him from the corner of my eye and think that this is what he was working toward, what he wanted when he put me in that first dress for the first dinner with the first man he chose. Not a daughter’s happiness. This room. These people. This moment.

Nadia finds my hand at the entrance, squeezes it once, briefly, before she takes her seat. I feel the loss of her the moment she lets go.

My father offers his arm.

I take it. This is the last time, I think. After today, I’m in Gachev’s house, the leverage will change shape, become less daily and less immediate. Holding his arm, I walk.

The aisle opens up in front of me, longer than it looked from the entrance, lined on both sides with the faces of people my father chose to witness this. I look straight ahead. My hand is light on his arm, the practiced lightness of a woman being given away willingly. I count the steps because my brain still does it automatically when everything else becomes too much. Thirty steps. Twenty-five. The music is playing, my posture is straight, and the flowers are at the right height. Everything is exactly as it was rehearsed, and I walk through it the way I’ve walked through everything for three years, one step and then the next. The performance carries me when nothing else can.

Twenty steps. Fifteen. Faces on either side blurring into each other, two hundred people watching the picture my father assembled over three years as it reaches its final frame. I think about Denis. I think about his hands on my face, the weight of him when I hold him, and how he smells after his bath.

Ten steps.

I think about Slava. I think about him the way I always think about him when the suppression slips, quickly, with the grief of touching something that isn’t there. I think my recent hallucination, and then about what it felt like to sleep without the loop running. I force myself to put it away because today, of all days, I cannot finish that thought.

Five steps.

David is at the altar.

He’s standing with the contained stillness I’ve come to associate with him, present without being consumed by it. When I reach him, what’s on his face isn’t triumph or satisfaction, it’s discomfort, honest and unperformed, the look of someone who is not entirely at peace with what he’s participating in. He’s not a villain. I know that. He’s just a man in a complicated arrangement who has the self-awareness to know it.

He gives me a small nod, and I give him one back. We’re two people acknowledging each other across something neither of us designed.

My father steps back to his seat. His work is done. I stand at the altar with my flowers at the correct height, face arranged, and let the priest begin.

The voice fills the church, high ceiling, old stone, two hundred witnesses. I breathe and stay present in the technical sense, eyes forward, everything performing its function.

Inside, I’m nowhere in particular. I’m somewhere with Denis. It’s the survival I’ve built my life around.

The doors at the back of the church open.

I don’t turn around. Large doors on old hinges, the sound behind me, but my eyes are on the priest, because today I am performing, and performing means not reacting. I’m very good at not reacting.

The murmur starts. Low, moving forward through the congregation from the back like wildfire, row by row, two hundred people registering something they weren’t expecting.

Something in my spine knows before my mind does. Before I’ve turned, before any conscious thought has formed, something animal stands up and says: you know what that is.

I turn.

19

Slava

I shaved this morning.

It took longer than expected. Three years is a long time for a habit to settle in. The beard came off in stages, the razor moving slowly while I looked at the stranger in the mirror, becoming someone I used to know. The face underneath is the same one, more or less. Older in the eyes. Sharper at the jaw. The glasses I’ve been wearing for three years as part of the disguise stayed on the table when I walked out. I didn’t look back at them.