Chapter 12
DAISY
I knock.
The sound of my knuckles on his door is small and definite and carries the weight of every door between us since the first one: the glass doors of Keyes, Inc.
on the morning I spilled coffee on my blouse and walked into a world I didn’t understand.
The conference room door. The file room door.
The restaurant door I walked out of. His penthouse door that I stood outside while I told him the truth and he kissed my forehead.
My apartment door that I closed with a click.
The bus station door. The hospital door.
Every door has been a threshold between one version of us and the next, and this one, his penthouse, his hallway, my fist against his wood, is the last.
He opens it.
He’s been crying. I can see it the same way he could see it on me the night he came to my apartment, the rawness around the eyes, the tension in the throat, the particular stillness of a man who has recently broken down and reassembled himself and the reassembly isn’t complete.
He’s in the same clothes from this morning and his hair is pushed back and his face is bare and unperformed and his eyes, when they find mine, hold something I have never seen in them.
Defeat.
He saw me. With Jeff. By the pool. He saw me crying in another man’s arms and he built a story about what it meant, because that’s what Anton Almazov does: he builds stories about people and believes them and the believing has cost him everything and he’s standing in his doorway with defeat in his eyes because he has just constructed the final story: she’s chosen someone else.
He steps aside. He lets me in.
The penthouse is dark. The same darkness from the night I came here with the truth, amber lamps, leather furniture, the wall of glass overlooking the harbour, but tonight the curtains are half-drawn and the city comes through in strips of gold and the bar cart has a bottle and a glass, recently used, and he’s a man who’s been sitting in the dark building the wrong story and drinking to make it bearable.
He doesn’t touch me.
He stands by the window with his hands at his sides. Not the composed, performance stance of the man who owned rooms by standing still in them. This is a man who has put his hands at his sides because he doesn’t trust them anywhere else. His jaw is tight. His eyes are on me. And he starts talking.
“I love you.”
Three words. No preamble. No charm. No half-lift or performance or the careful architecture of a man who has spent his life choosing words for maximum effect.
Just three words, spoken into the dark penthouse with the city burning behind him and his hands at his sides and his voice already breaking on the second one.
“I have loved you since the moment you colour-tabbed a file for a man you didn’t know was a monster.
I loved you when you told me it wasn’t appropriate.
I loved you when you put your hand on my chest in a file room and didn’t push.
I loved you on a balcony when you kissed me back and I loved you in your apartment when you smiled at me and I loved you when you closed the door with a click and I’ve loved you every morning I’ve carried a thermos to your door and every evening I’ve paced this floor listening for the sound of you moving through your life two stories below me. ”
His voice cracks. Not a small crack. A fracture that runs through the centre of the sentence and splits it open and what comes through isn’t the man who charmed billionaires and read rooms and built an empire on certainty.
What comes through is the boy from the funeral.
The fifteen-year-old who gripped his twin’s hand and swore he would never let anyone close enough to break him.
“I was wrong,” he tells me. “About everything. About you. About innocence. About what love looks like. I thought love was the exception. I told Artem at his wedding that our brothers were the fortunate ones. That they were the exceptions, not the rule.” He swallows.
“You were the proof that it wasn’t. That love is the rule.
And I almost destroyed it because I couldn’t fathom that it was real. ”
I’m standing four feet away from him. My hand is on my belly.
My baby is moving, a slow rolling kick that I feel against my palm, and Anton Almazov is giving me a speech that is costing him everything and I can hear it.
I can hear the cost in every syllable, in how his voice falters on the word real, in how his hands grip each other behind his back because he cannot trust them at his sides anymore.
“But I won’t cage you.” His eyes are wet.
“I see that you’ve found someone good. Someone with clean hands.
Someone who didn’t need to break you first in order to understand what he was holding.
” His throat works. “I’ll be here for the baby.
I’ll be here for whatever you need. But I’m letting you go, Daisy.
Because you deserve a man who believed you the first time, and I wasn’t that man, and the price of that is watching you walk into someone else’s arms and knowing I put you there. ”
He stops. The penthouse is silent. The city burns.
His hands are behind his back and his eyes are wet and his voice is gone, spent, emptied of every word he had, and he’s standing in front of me with nothing left and I can see it: I can see that this speech was the last thing he had and he’s given it to me and he expects me to take it and walk away and close another door behind me with another click.
“Why are you saying this?”
My voice comes out shaky. Bewildered. Not the voice of a woman who has rehearsed this moment but the voice of a woman who is hearing the man she loves tell her he’s letting her go and who cannot understand why he would do this now, tonight, after everything.
He falters. “I know you and—”
“Nothing.”
The word comes out small and fierce and trembling.
“We’re nothing. He kissed me and I couldn’t—” My voice catches.
I press my hand harder against my belly where the baby is rolling and I push through because I have spent this entire story trying to tell this man the truth and being disbelieved and I will not stop now.
“I couldn’t kiss him back. My mouth wouldn’t move.
My hands wouldn’t move. He kissed me and my body refused because—”
I stop.
He stops.
The city outside goes silent. The harbour, the yachts, the Mediterranean, the whole of Monaco holds its breath, and we are two people in a dark penthouse four feet apart and the four feet is the distance between every wrong story he’s ever built and the truth I’ve been carrying since a conference room and a file with yellow tabs.
“Because of what?” His voice is barely there. A rasp. A ruin.
“Because of you.”
His face breaks.
“It’s always been you. Even when I hated you for what you did to me.
Even when I went home to Idaho and cried for two months and put my hand on my stomach without knowing why.
Even when I sat in a hospital bed and told you I only wanted you here for the baby and it was a lie, it was the biggest lie I’ve ever told, because I wanted you there for me.
Even when Jeff kissed me and my body said no.
It was you. It’s always been you. And I’m so tired of you not believing me. ”
I’m crying. I don’t wipe the tears. I let them come because I’m done hiding from this man and I’m done buttoning my cardigan to my throat and I’m done being brave and composed and Idaho-strong.
I’m a young woman standing in a penthouse in Monaco with a baby in her belly and tears on her face and the truth in her mouth and if he doesn’t believe me this time I will survive it because I have survived everything else, but I need him to believe me. Just once. Just this once.
ANTON
I cross the room.
I don’t interpret. I don’t calculate. I don’t read her micro-expressions or assess the probability that she’s performing sincerity or construct a narrative about what her tears mean.
For the first time in my life, I stop reading and I just listen, and what I hear is a woman who has told me the truth from the very first day and who is standing in my penthouse with tears on her face telling me again and I believe her.
I just believe her.
My hands find her face. Both hands. Her cheeks are wet and warm and her eyes are brown and bright and terrified and furious and full of something that I have been misreading since a conference room and a file with yellow tabs, and I am holding her face and I’m not performing and she’s not performing and for the first time there is nothing between us except the truth.
“Say it again.”
“It’s you.”
I kiss her.
Not the Ace Royale kiss. Not the balcony kiss with the harbour below and the music behind and the taste of champagne.
Not the seduction, not the man who reads people, not the experiment or the thesis or the investigation.
Just me. Just Anton. My mouth on hers. My hands shaking against her cheeks the way they shook the night I destroyed her, except this time the shaking means something completely different.
This time the shaking means I believe you.
I believe you. I have always been wrong and you have always been right and I believe you.
She kisses me back.
Her hands come to my chest, that same place, that same spot where she put her palm in a file room and didn’t push, and this time she doesn’t push either.
This time she grabs. Her fingers close on my shirt and she pulls me closer and her mouth opens under mine and the sound she makes isn’t broken like it was in her apartment.
This sound is whole. Fierce. The sound of a woman who has been fighting to be believed for almost every moment of her life and has finally, finally been heard.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. Her forehead against mine. Her breath on my mouth. Her hands fisted in my shirt. My hands on her face. The baby between us, moving against my abdomen that I feel through both our clothes and that breaks something open in me that I will never be able to close.
“You don’t get to misread me again,” she tells me.
“Never.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She presses her forehead harder against mine.
Her eyes are closed. Her tears are drying on the cheeks I’m still holding.
Her hands are still fisted in my shirt. And her voice, when it comes, is the voice of a girl from Idaho who walked into a file room and put her hand on a monster’s chest and didn’t push and who has been waiting, since that moment, for the monster to stop letting her go.
“Then stop letting me go.”
I pull her closer. I wrap my arms around her and the baby and the truth and I hold on.
I hold on like Andrei held my hand at our father’s funeral, so hard the bones creak, so hard it says I’m never letting go of this, not for my pride, not for my certainty, not for the years of reading people that told me love was the exception and not the rule.
She was the rule.
She was always the rule.
And I’m done letting her go.