Page 13 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“I don’t know,” I say. My voice comes out strange, stripped of all emotion.

Nadia nods. She holds the test between us without pushing it toward me or pulling it back. It’s there, existing in the space between us as a question that has an answer and the answer will change things. One way or the other, the answer will change things.

I force myself to look at it again.

The light moves across the floor. My father is on the phone somewhere in the house. The city moves outside, indifferent, continuous, the same city that moved past the car window on the night everything ended. In a bedroom in a house on its grid, a woman who has spent weeks learning how to survive the death of the person she loved more than life itself is sitting on a bed looking at a small white object, and the weight of what it might tell her is the first thing in weeks that has felt like it matters.

I keep looking at it without reaching for it. I can’t. Not yet.

Nadia holds it patiently. She doesn’t push. She knows better, knows that it needs to come from me. I need to be ready. Well, as ready as I can be.

Nevertheless, the question hangs between us, patient and waiting in its own way.

10

Pavlina

“The florist needs a decision on the centerpieces by Thursday,” my father’s assistant says, sliding a folder across the table. “White roses or peonies. Mr. Gachev has expressed no preference.”

“White roses,” I say, because one answer is the same as the other, and white roses will end the conversation faster.

She writes it down, then moves to the next item. The seating chart, the menu tasting scheduled for next week, and the question of whether I want a string quartet or a pianist for the ceremony. I look at the chart spread across the table, names in neat boxes, alliances mapped in the language of who sits where and who doesn’t. I’ve been here before. I know exactly how this ends. At least this time, if it follows the same pattern, I won’t be surprised.

“String quartet,” I say.

She writes it down.

The fitting is after lunch. A woman I’ve never met pins fabric around me with the efficiency of someone doing a job, not a woman dressing a bride. I stand on the low platform in the center of a room full of mirrors and look at my reflection from six angles, feeling nothing about any of them. The dress is ivory, not white. My father’s suggestion. White is for a first wedding, he said. He didn’t look at me when he said it.

I look at my hands in the mirror. They’ve filled back out over the last three years, the weight returned, the knuckles less pronounced. My body decided to stay even when I didn’t ask it to, and rebuilt itself quietly while I was elsewhere. I’ve made a kind of peace with that, the same peace I’ve made with most things. I never arrived to the forgiveness part. Not even acceptance. Just the cessation of active resistance, which is the closest I get to either.

“Can you lift your arms?” the seamstress asks.

I obey, and she continues with her pins. I stand, watching the moving city through the window.

Ten days. Someone told me this morning, my father’s assistant reading from a schedule, and I pushed it to the back of my mind the way I store most information now, as a data point with no weight attached to it. Ten days until I marry David Gachev, fifty-two years old, widower, politically connected, wealthy in the way that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with what the money represents. My father spent eight months selecting him. Three meetings, two dinners, and one conversation I wasn’t present for that apparently settled everything. Even though I didn’t ask, my father informed me that Gachev was a reasonable man and I wouldn’t be unhappy.

I wouldn’t be unhappy, but I won’t be happy or loved. Not any of the things I once believed marriage could mean. Just not unhappy, which is the ceiling of what my father considers worth offering.

The seamstress finishes with the pins, steps back, and looks at me the way people look at brides, searching for the emotion that’s supposed to be there. I give her a small smile that I’ve practiced until I learned to place it and make it exactly the right size. She seems satisfied and writes something in her notebook before leaving me standing on the platform in a dress I don’t want for a wedding I didn’t choose. I look at myself in all six mirrors, realizing how good I got at pretending and playing the role my father always wanted me to.

I am. That’s the truth I’ve made peace with too. Three years of doing exactly what my father needs me to do in exactly the rooms he needs me to do it in. I’ve gotten so good at it that sometimes I don’t notice I’m doing it until it’s over. The composure is real now, not effortful. It doesn’t cost me anything because there isn’t much left underneath it to cost.

Nadia is waiting outside the fitting room when I come out. She takes one look at me and hands me a coffee without speaking, which is the best possible thing to do because there’s nothing to say about any of this, and she knows it. We both do. Words have failed us a long time ago. I take the coffee, and we walk to the car together. I drink it in the back seat while the driver navigates the city. Nadia sits beside me, pretending to watch the buildings go past, but I know she’s secretly watching me.

“You don’t have to do this,” she says eventually. She still believes I have a say in the matter. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.

“I know,” I say, not wanting to get into this now.

She looks at me. “Pavlina.”

“I know, Nadia,” I say with a sigh, then look out the window. A woman on the pavement pushing a buggy, a child inside it, dark hair, the wrong age, the wrong everything, but my eyes go to it anyway, the way they always do. It’s the reflex I haven’t managed to train away in three years. “There’s nothing to be done about it, and you know it.”

She doesn’t answer. She knows I’m right, and she hates that I’m right, and that’s the full extent of what either of us can do with it.

My father finds me in the sitting room. He didn’t call me to his office, which means he has something to say and has been waiting for the right moment to say it. He comes in with the same settled energy he always has, a man pleased with how things are running, who has recently looked at his empire and found it satisfactory.

“Gachev called this morning,” he says. “He’s looking forward to Thursday’s dinner.”