Page 9 of My Wedding Night Massacre

He appears in the doorway two minutes later. Not alarmed, not pale, not a man who’s just heard his daughter come apart through a shared wall. He takes in the room in one sweep, glass, wreckage, and me at the center of it. His face doesn’t move.

“This isn’t productive, Pavlina.” He speaks quietly, which on him has never meant softness, only control. “Pull yourself together. We have things to discuss.”

I look up at him from the floor. I look at the man I called Father for twenty-seven years, the man who straightened my veil yesterday morning and said he was proud of me. I watch him look at his broken daughter in a ruined room and find it mildly inconvenient.

I don’t have the energy to hate him yet. But I can feel the emotion there, underneath the emptiness. It’s slow, dense, and permanent as it assembles itself in the dark. It will be ready when I need it. For now, I just look at him until he decides the conversation is over and leaves, footsteps already moving toward the next thing, phone already back at his ear.

“...yes, the lawyers confirmed this morning, we can move on the accounts by Monday...”

Nadia comes across the room. She doesn’t look at the damage, doesn’t start thinking about how to clean it, what to tell my father, or how to manage any of the wreckage of what just happened. Instead, she finds a clear patch of floor in front of the bed, sits down beside me with her back against the frame, and puts her shoulder against mine.

I feel it before I hear myself say anything.

“I didn’t tell him,” I say. My voice is barely recognizable, scraped hollow. “At the end. There were so many moments, and I didn’t take any of them.”

“Pavlina.” Her voice is low.

“I thought we had time.” I press the back of my hand against my mouth for a second. “We were going to have so much time.”

Nadia’s hand finds mine on the floor between us. She wraps both of hers around it and holds on. She doesn’t tell me he knew, doesn’t tell me it doesn’t matter, doesn’t tell me any of the things people say to try to make grief smaller than it actually is. She just holds my hand in the quiet after, in the wreckage, in the thin morning light coming through the window where the curtain used to be.

Outside, the city still moves. Cars, voices, a dog somewhere, someone calling to someone else across a street that doesn’t know what ended last night. My father’s call continues in the next room. The sun crosses the floor in slow degrees, indifferent, illuminating glass and split wood. The white dress crumpled against the wall that I never want to look at again.

But I look at it anyway.

I look at it and think about the last moment we shared in the dark room, his hands in my hair, and the way he said I love you in the quiet after. He didn’t say it like a declaration or like he needed anything from me. He said it because it was true, and he saw no reason not to say true things out loud. I think about his grey eyes in the low light. I think about the smile on his face when he caught me looking.

Nadia’s thumb moves slowly across my knuckles.

I don’t know what I am now, on the other side of this. I don’t know what comes after emptiness, how long it lasts, or whether the thing being assembled in the dark beneath it will be something I can use or something that uses me. I know my father will come back with his plans. He’ll expect me to move on and do what he says. I’ll have to find the strength to deal with him when he does.

But not yet.

It may never be.

Life is fickle, and in this moment, mine is hanging on a very thin thread.

Right now, there’s the floor, the quiet, and Nadia’s hand in mine.

That’s enough to breathe through. It has to be for now.

7

Pavlina

“My office,” my father says, passing the bedroom door without stopping. “Ten minutes.”

I sit on the edge of the bed and look at the floor, at the patch of carpet where Nadia and I sat last night after she’d cleaned up the worst of the glass. The mirror and the curtain rod are still gone. The room looks like a place where something gave way. I sit in it and think about whether I have the energy to stand up, walk down a corridor, and sit across from the man who arranged my husband’s murder long before we got married.

I don’t. But I go anyway, because I don’t know how to refuse him yet. That muscle has never been used.

The walk through the house is wrong in the way everything has been wrong since the car. Details landing slightly off, sounds arriving a half-beat late, my own feet feeling like they belong to someone I used to be. The runner on the stairs, frayed at the left edge, frayed for years, never replaced because he never noticed it and I never thought it worth raising. The smell of coffee from the kitchen. All of it from a different life, a life where I walked through this house knowing who everyone in it was.

He’s at his desk when I push the door open. Jacket on, papers in front of him, reading glasses he won’t admit he needs pushed up on his nose. He looks like a man who has slept well. He gestures to the chair across from him without looking up, the way he used to when I was a child summoned for some correction or other. I cross the room and sit in it because my legs carry me there before I can tell them not to.

He takes his glasses off, sets them on the desk, and folds his hands.

“Slava Yeleshev has been confirmed dead.” He says it the way he’d read a line from a contract. “The organization has no surviving leadership. His father is gone. His second is in the wind.” A breath, just punctuation. “As his widow, you are the legal heir to his estate and what remains of his operation. Which means the Yeleshev assets transfer under your name, and your name is mine to direct.”