Page 36 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“My father came to me between the reception line and the first course,” she says. Her voice has no softness in it. “He said he needed me upstairs. A family matter. I went because I always went, because I spent my entire life going when he said come.”

“That’s not—”

“I’m not finished.” She says it without raising her voice, which is somehow worse. “There were two men at the door I’d never seen. When I tried to leave, they stopped me. I couldn’t get past them. I screamed your name until I couldn’t make a sound anymore. My father was there. He stood in the middle of the room and finished his fucking drink.”

“Pavlina—”

“He didn’t speak to me once.” She keeps going, riding over my attempt to cut in the same way I rode over hers. “Not once. He watched me fight his men, and he watched me figure out what was happening, and he said nothing. They moved me when it went quiet. There was a window on the side street.” She stops. “I saw you on the concrete.”

I let that sit.

“I didn’t know,” she says. “I want to be clear about that because you’ve apparently spent three years being unclear about it. I didn’t know about the rotation or the men or any of it. I was a face at a dinner table, and a body in a white dress, and that’s all I ever was to him.”

“You could have been told selectively,” I say, because I have to, because I’m not done yet. “Your father is careful. He wouldn’t have needed you to know the whole plan. Just enough to keep you out of the way.”

Her eyes go flat. “You’re still building it.”

“I’m being thorough.”

“You’ve been thorough for three years, and you still walked into a church this morning, so clearly thorough isn’t working.” She stands from the couch, the ruined dress shifting around her legs. “You want to talk about evidence? I tried to die, Slava. Does that factor into your case? Does that make the list?”

“That’s not—” I stop. Restart. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean? Because from where I’m standing, you had two options. Either I helped my father kill your family and then spent three years in his house nearly dying over a man I’d helped destroy, or I had nothing to do with it, and you wasted three years hating me.” She tilts her head. “Which one makes more sense?”

“Neither of them is that clean,” I say. “Nothing about this is clean.”

“No,” she agrees, and the anger in her voice has exhaustion underneath it now, the kind that comes from having been furious for a long time. “Nothing about this is clean. But I’m the one who’s been living in it, and you’re the one who got to be dead, so I think you can afford to extend some good faith.”

“I was in a hospital for two months. In Palermo, Pavlina. In fucking Italy.”

“And I was in that house doing everything he needed me to do because the alternative was worse.” She pulls back from whatever she was about to say, redirects. “So yes, I complied. I did everything he asked, and I hated every second of it. That’s the evidence, Slava. That’s the whole case.”

I look at her standing in the middle of the room in the wrecked dress with her hair coming loose, her eyes still red, and her jaw set like she’s bracing for another round. I think about three years of building a version of her I could be angry at because grief without a target is just grief, and I didn’t have the luxury.

“I didn’t know what to do with it,” I say. It comes out quieter than I intend.

She blinks. “What?”

“What I felt. After.” I don’t look away. “I loved you, and you were gone, and I didn’t know if you’d chosen to be gone or been taken, and I couldn’t hold both things at once. So, I held the one that let me function.”

The anger is still there, but it’s shifted, made room for a reluctant understanding to sit alongside it.

“That’s the most honest thing you’ve said since the church,” she says.

“I know.”

“It’s also a terrible excuse.”

“I know that too.”

She lets out a breath that’s not quite a laugh and not quite a sob and sits back down on the edge of the couch. She puts her face in her hands for a moment, just a moment, then drops them and looks up at me.

I reach back to the table. I pick up the photograph. I hold it for a moment, looking at the dark blond hair, the grey eyes, the jaw I’ve seen in mirrors my entire life. Then I cross the room and hold it out to her.

She looks at it without taking it from my hand. Her face moves through something rapid and complicated, recognition and exposure, and the look of someone whose carefully held secret has just been seen by the one person she wasn’t ready for.

“Where did you get that?” she asks.