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At thirteen minutes past eight, Arina Maximova walks into the restaurant like she's doing me a personal favor.
She's changed. Simple black dress, long sleeves, boots, hair loose around her shoulders. A little color on her mouth.
“You look beautiful.”
She sits, smooths her napkin, and refuses to acknowledge I've spoken. Then she sees the bottle on the table.
Saperavi. A small vineyard in Kakheti most people outside Georgia have never heard of.
“How,” she says.
“You ordered it at your father's sixtieth. You sent the first glass back because it was served too cold.”
“That was four years ago.”
“You were right. It was too cold.”
She tastes it. Her eyes close for half a second before she catches herself.
“This isn't a date,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Stop agreeing with me.” She says it in a polite tone so as not to attract attention to the table, but the threat in her eyes tells me she is being firm.
“Would you rather I argued?”
“Yes. Then at least I'd know what you were doing.”
The khachapuri arrives, bubbling cheese with a raw yolk in the middle. Arina tears off the end of the crust before the plate hits the table, drags it through the yolk, then remembers I'm watching and slows down.
“Don't,” I say. “Don't slow down because I'm here. Eat.”
She holds my gaze, tears off a bigger piece, and eats it with deliberate defiance. A little cheese catches at the corner of her mouth. I pick up my wine glass to give my hand something to do that isn’t reaching out to her.
She asks questions like she's interrogating a suspect. What exactly did I do for her father? Who else knew about the will? I answer all of them honestly, and that seems to make her angrier.
Finally, she sets her fork down. “The pastries. Ruslan. The wine. How do you know all of this?”
“I pay attention.”
“Since when?”
I could say since your father asked me to. It's even true. It's just not where it starts.
“Since you were twenty-one.”
She goes very still. “Papa didn't ask you to watch me when I was twenty-one.”
“No. That was two years later.”
Understanding moves across her face slowly, like she's being pulled underwater an inch at a time.
“You're telling me you've been paying this much attention to me for six years. Long before he came up with this ridiculous will.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
