Page 53 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

“You’ve got that fucking right,” my mouth goes off like a machine gun. “You didn’t know her the way I did. No one did. So, no, you can’t talk about her. You don’t get to. No one does.”

“Do you hear yourself?” she asks.

I stare at her in grim, furious silence.

There’s that disappointment again, splashing over me like water shaken from a dog’s fur. “Fine. I can shut up and let it go. But know that, while I’m doing that, you’re going to lose the wife who stormed out of this place four hours ago. She’s gone, Anton.”

Gone. She’s gone where?

“And I doubt she’s coming back, if the words she was shouting were any indication.”

You don’t want me to abort your baby and free you? Darya had spat in my face. I wonder if that’s what my cousin refers to. I can’t bear to ask, either way. I’m too winded, stumbling backward until my back hits the wall. Even that doesn’t feel solid enough to hold me up.

“I’m not trying to talk shit about Irina. For one, I’d never speak ill of the dead. And she may not have been my favorite person, but she was someone you cared about. And she died. And that’s so fucking awful. It’s a fucking waste. But so is what you’re doing.” When did she round the desk? I don’t know. Her hands cradle my face like a mother’s. “You made a myth of her when she was just a person. And you lost her, tragically, and lost a baby, and you’ve been using it as a cautionary tale to keep yourself in line or something. And it’s fucking sick. And it’s unfair.”

“Stop it,” I say. It comes out pleading. Stop. Stop it.

“Irina is dead. And Darya isn’t. Irina is a person you grew to love, in a marriage you were intent on honoring because you don’t want to be like your papa. It was noble of you then, but it isn’t now. There’s nothing noble about sacrificing the woman you’re falling in love with because you’re not done punishing yourself for a tragedy you had no control over.”

Arguments fill up and clog my throat, crashing into each other, one atop another, like a five-car pile-up.

I shouldn’t have taken her home. I should’ve kept a closer eye on her pregnancy. I should’ve gone to every doctor’s appointment. I should’ve known about the thrombophilia—should’ve been her advocate when she was tearing her body apart for our daughter. Should’ve made sure she took her supplements instead of worrying about making sure there was a prosperous fucking kingdom for my child to inherit one day. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.

I should’ve, I should’ve, I should’ve.

“You have to forgive yourself.”

“Please go,” I croak.

“How can I?” Anastasia asks, with heartbreak and devastation in her almost black eyes. “You’re in pieces, Tosha.”

Chapter 19 - Darya

I suppose if there’s anything that a lifelong love for 19th-century paintings has taught me—besides an appreciation for corsets and velvet furniture, of course—it’s that there is a particular poetry to wallowing. In a moment of time where I’ve got no interest in doing anything else, I intend to practice it with the same rigor I bring to everything else.

Let’s not think about how I’ll have to, if I want my family to stop looking at me with such worry—or hunting down my husband. At least not until I decide I actually want him dead or not.

Murder isn’t generally the sort of thing a person can take back.

I arrived at the Yuri estate sometime after midnight, my eyes red and swollen but ultimately dry, having exhausted my tears somewhere on the road from Norfolk County to Middlesex County.

The gate guard had taken one look at my face and waved me through without a word; I may have looked like a mess, but I will always be a Yuri. And that’s all I need to belong here.

I’d let myself in through the side entrance, sneaking in the way I’d let Nadya coax me into doing a few times in our childhood. Then I’d headed straight to the bedroom that’s always been mine and always will be—the one with the rosebud wallpaper and a window-seat overlooking the garden, the same spot I’d spent the better part of my adolescence reading and being dramatically melancholy long before I had anything genuinely melancholy to be dramatic about.

Is that why I’m making up for lost time now?

That joke hadn’t really been a hit when Trifon had appeared in the doorway at some point. He’d taken one look at me through his bleary eyes, looked over at my body curled up in the window-seat, still in my coat because I hadn’t been able to summon the energy to take it off—and said nothing. Just stood there for a moment with that particular expression he wears when he’s deciding whether to push or let it go, and then he’d gone and come back with a blanket, which he’d dropped on my lap without comment, and left again.

That’s love, I’d thought. That’s what caring about a person looks like. Not telling them to get out and only come back when you’re calm.

I’d cried again after that, which I was furious about. At least I have Anton to thank for something. No matter how upset I am with my own heart’s fickle behavior, it’ll forever pale in comparison with how he’s devastated me.

***

The estate has its own rhythm, and I fall back into it the way a body gets tired at bedtime and hungry when you’ve trained it to be ready to eat. This is the place where I know which floorboards creak and which don’t. I know the particular quality of the light in the front room at ten in the morning, and the way the kitchen smells when someone’s had coffee going since seven, and the sound of Trifon’s voice through walls when he’s on a call he doesn’t want anyone to hear—lower than usual, clipped at the edges.

I haunt the place like the ghost of a Victorian orphan.