Page 37 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“Your desk,” I say. “Three nights ago.”

She takes it from me slowly. Holds it. Her thumb moves to the edge of the frame and stays there, not moving, just resting, like she’s steadying herself through the contact.

“Ask me,” she says. Her voice is very controlled.

“Who is he?” I ask. It isn’t a question.

“You know who he is.”

“I want you to say it.”

She looks up from the photograph. Her honey-brown eyes find mine and hold. The room goes very still around us, the afternoon light unmoving on the stone floor, the villa quiet in a way that has weight to it now, the weight of what’s sitting between us waiting to be named.

Her mouth opens.

She closes it.

She looks back down at the photograph, at the grey eyes looking up at the camera from a face that is two years old and unmistakably, irreversibly mine. Her jaw is tight. Her thumb hasn’t moved from the edge of the frame.

“Pavlina,” I say.

She looks up at me, and I see every layer she has left, the composure she’s spent three years building, and the grief underneath it and the fury underneath that, and underneath all of it, something I recognize because I’ve been carrying the same thing since the night of our wedding. The two of us standing in a stranger’s villa with the question between us, both of us already knowing the answer.

She doesn’t say it.

Not yet.

24

Pavlina

“Yes,” I say.

Just that. No softening around it, no buildup, no careful placement of the word where it will do the least damage. He asked, and I’m answering, and he doesn’t get tenderness from me on this one. He wasn’t there. He forfeited tenderness when he wasn’t there.

His face does what it does when he’s absorbing something he already knew but hadn’t let himself finish knowing. I watch it happen without helping him through it. I hold the photograph, and I wait until his eyes come back to mine, then keep going because I’ve been keeping this in a sealed room for two years. The door is open now. I’m not closing it again.

“I found out six weeks after the wedding,” I say. “Alone, in my father’s bathroom, because he’d moved me back into his house and I had nowhere else to go. I sat on the floor for an hour before I could stand up.”

Slava hasn’t moved. He’s watching me with his hands at his sides, his jaw set, his grey eyes doing the work his face won’t.

“My father was pleased,” I say. “Not for any reason that had anything to do with me. An heir. Leverage. A Lyubimtsev who carried Yeleshev blood, useful for legitimizing whatever came next. He was very pleased.” I set the photograph down on the table beside me, face up, Denis’s eyes looking at the ceiling. “He moved me to a different part of the house when I started showing. I got a better room and better care. Nadia was allowed to stay longer. All of it was conditional. All of it in service of the asset I was carrying.”

I hear my own voice, and it sounds like it belongs to someone giving a deposition. Flat, ordered, stripped of everything except the facts. It’s the only tone available to me right now. If I let any warmth into it I’ll lose the thread, and I can’t lose the thread yet.

“Denis was born in February,” I say. “Seven and a half months after our wedding. He came out with your hair, your eyes, your jaw. I held him in a hospital room with my father standing near the window. I understood in about thirty seconds that I was going to be alive for a very long time, whether I wanted to be or not.” I look at Slava directly. “He was the only reason I stayed alive. The reason why I didn’t try again. After the bathroom. After everything. I stayed because he needed me to stay, because I wasn’t going to let my father raise him without me around.”

Slava’s throat moves.

“My father understood that too,” I say. “Access to my son became his instrument. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sunday afternoons when I was cooperative. When I wasn’t, the schedule moved. Something came up. Maybe next week. He never said no out loud. He never needed to. I learned the rules inside the first month.”

I watch Slava’s face. The case he built over three years is coming apart in real time, piece by piece, each thing I say removing one more support. I don’t feel satisfied watching it. I thought I would. I’ve imagined this conversation in various forms for a long time, the version where I said all of it to his face, where I watched him understand what it actually was. I thought there would be relief in it, or cold satisfaction of being believed after a very long time of not being believed.

There’s none of that. There’s just tired.

“I almost married David Gachev this morning,” I say. “I want you to understand that the alternative would have been my father deciding I was no longer cooperative, and Denis growing up with visits that kept getting shorter and farther apart until they stopped entirely.” I hear my voice go flat on the last few words. I don’t try to fix it. “I was going to marry a man I didn’t know to keep access to my own child. That’s what three years looked like. That’s the whole of it.”

He says my name. Just once, low.