Page 38 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I shake my head. Not yet. I do not want him to say my name like that yet, not when I’m still in the middle of it, because if I let him say it like that, I’m going to lose the thread.

“I did all of it alone,” I say. “Every day of it. Every document, every dinner, every dress fitting, every morning I woke up, looked at my son’s face, put the grief away because he needed a mother who was present, not a mother falling apart.” My voice cracks on the last word. I let it crack, but I also keep going. “I didn’t have anyone who knew the whole of it. Nadia knew pieces. My father knew his version. Denis didn’t know anything except that his mother came on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and sometimes Sundays. He knew that I always left again.” I stop. I press my hand flat against my sternum for a second, feeling the pressure of everything still packed in there. “He waits at the window for my car. Every time. He’s already there when I arrive, standing at the glass, waiting.”

I stop talking.

The villa is quiet around us, the afternoon light sitting still on the stone floor, the maps on the table, the two laptops, all the evidence of a life Slava has been living while I was in that house doing what I was told. I look at all of it. The distance between the two lives we’ve been living is vast, doesn’t get smaller just because we’re in the same room now.

He’s very still.

I can see the dismantling on his face. The version of me he built over three years is losing its shape, feature by feature, the whole carefully maintained structure quietly giving way. Three years of needing me to be the answer to what happened to his family, to be the thing that made the loss make sense. Now he’s standing in this room watching it not be true. I can see it landing in him in ways I don’t have the energy to account for.

The anger is gone. It was real, burned hot all the way through the church, the car, the first hour of this room. But anger requires fuel. I’ve run out. What’s left is older, quieter, the exhaustion of a person who has been carrying too much for too long, finally setting it down in front of someone else.

He says my name again.

I shake my head. I turn away, arms wrapping around myself, my back to the room. Through the window, the city does its late-afternoon thing, indifferent, the light turning golden over the rooftops. Somewhere on the other side of the city, my father is in a room, regrouping, running the new numbers, figuring out what this morning cost him. Somewhere out there, Denis is with his nanny, his toys, and his picture called Mama, not knowing any of this is happening.

He doesn’t know his father is alive.

He doesn’t know his father is standing six feet behind me in a stranger’s house. I can’t decide if that’s the most important thing that’s happened today or just one more thing I don’t have the capacity to hold yet.

I stand at the window, breathe, and don’t turn around.

25

Slava

She said everything, and now she’s standing at the window with her arms around herself, her back to the room, her back to me, and the case I built over three years is gone. Not cracked, not damaged, not in need of revision. Gone. What it leaves behind isn’t relief. It’s a grief I didn’t let myself feel because I had the case to tend to instead, raw, structureless, with nowhere to go and nothing to do with itself.

She kept my son alive by keeping herself alive. She signed documents, attended dinners, and stood at a second altar all because of Denis. It was always Denis.

I look at her shoulders, the rigid set of them, her hands gripping her own arms, and I understand that if I open my mouth, she’ll have a wall up before I’ve finished the first sentence. We’re both too good at words deployed as weapons. We’ve been doing it since the church, since she walked off the altar, since the first time I tried to explain myself and she cut me off at the knees. Words won’t reach her right now. She’s already too defensive against them.

Instead, I cross the room and come up behind her, close enough that she hears me before I touch her, and I put my arms around her. Not the urgency of the couch, not the desperate proof-seeking of two people who needed to know the other was real. Just my arms around her, my chest against her back, holding her the way you hold something you came close to losing without understanding how close.

She goes rigid. Every muscle in her body locks at once, the old reflex, the one she’s been running on for three years, don’t let anything in that might cost you something you can’t afford. I expected it. I don’t move, don’t tighten my grip, don’t try to talk her through it. I just stay.

The window in front of us holds the city’s late afternoon, the light going golden over the rooftops, indifferent. I feel her breathing, the shallow controlled rhythm of someone managing themselves through contact, the same management I’ve watched her perform for three years in photographs and for the last several hours in real time.

Then it releases. Not all at once. Like a breath held too long finally giving out, slow and involuntary, the body making a decision the mind hadn’t finished making. She leans back into me, fraction by fraction, her spine finding my chest, her weight shifting toward me, and I receive it without a word, tightening my arms by degrees, matching whatever she’s willing to give.

Her hands come up and cover mine where they cross at her waist. She doesn’t grip them, just rests her palms over them, her fingers settling between mine. Contact without demand. Presence without performance. The first thing either of us has done today that wasn’t about surviving.

I rest my chin against her hair.

We stay like that for a long time. The city moves outside the window, the light shifting, the rooftops going darker as the afternoon turns. Neither of us speaks because there’s nothing words can do here. Three years of distance, grief, fury, the case I built, and the case she lived, all of it sitting between us and none of it requiring a resolution tonight, not this minute, not in the first quiet we’ve found since the church.

At some point, she turns.

Not all at once. A slow rotation, her hands still on my arms, her face tipping up toward mine in the low light. I look at her, at the red-rimmed eyes and the tear-tracked face and the honey-brown eyes that have been watching me all day, trying to decide if I’m real. I understand that we’ve arrived somewhere different from where we’ve been.

I kiss her.

Not with urgency, not with the need to verify, consume, or close a gap. I kiss her the way I would have kissed her on our first morning together if we’d had a first morning, slow, present, my hands moving to her face, thumbs at her jaw, tilting her toward me. She kisses me back with the same attention, her hands finding the front of my shirt, not grabbing, just resting, both of us here, both knowing exactly who we’re with.

I get the ruined dress off her properly this time, working the buttons one by one with more patience than I had on the couch. She undoes my shirt while I work, her fingers moving down the buttons without rushing, and we undress each other in the low light like people who have time, because for the next hour, in this room, we do.

I take the dress off her shoulders when the last button gives, sliding it down, and she lets me look. I’ve already had her today, the desperate kind, the proving kind, both of us trying to close a gap that couldn’t be closed that way. This is different. I look at her in the low light, the full curve of her hips, the softness of her waist, the weight of her breasts, the body I’ve had my hands on twice already since I came back and am looking at now like I’m seeing it for the first time. She holds my gaze, her lower lip caught between her teeth, a flicker of the old self-consciousness moving through her eyes before it settles.