Chapter Thirty-One #2
Stefan’s daughter. Eighteen. Rescued from Gavriil’s trafficking ring the same day they found Debra.
She’s thin still—too thin, her collarbones visible above the neckline of her floral dress—but there’s light in her face.
She hangs close to her mother, one hand gripping the strap of her bag, watching the grounds with wide eyes.
I recognize that look. I’ve seen it on Debra.
The vigilance of someone whose body remembers things their mind is trying to file away.
I go to meet them. Stefan sees me coming and gives me a nod—brief, formal, exactly the amount of warmth he permits himself during working hours, which is apparently all hours.
“Stefan.” I extend my hands to his wife. “You must be—”
“Natalia.” She takes both my hands and squeezes. “He talks about you constantly. Well—” She side-eyes Stefan. “Constantly by his standards, which is about three sentences a month.”
I decide immediately that I like her.
“Julia.” I turn to the girl. Gentle. Careful. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
She gives me a small, careful smile. “Thank you for having me.”
There’s a conversation happening underneath this one, the acknowledgment of what we share, the invisible thread connecting women who’ve been touched by the same violence.
I don’t pull on it. I just let her know, with a look and a touch on her arm, that she’s safe here.
That this garden, today, is a good place.
Debra appears on the terrace. She’s wearing a lavender dress Yanis bought her—one with a loose collar and long sleeves that cover her wrists—and her hair is down, soft around her shoulders, longer than it was a month ago.
Yanis walks a step behind her, close but not crowding. Always that calibrated distance.
I wave Debra over. She sees Julia, and something passes between them; recognition, maybe. The silent recognition of survivors meeting in a normal setting and agreeing, without words, not to discuss it today.
“This is my sister, Debra,” I say. “Debs, this is Natalia, Stefan’s wife. And Julia, his daughter.”
Debra shakes Natalia’s hand. Meets Julia’s eyes. Holds them a beat longer than politeness requires.
“Nice to meet you,” Julia says.
“You too,” Debra says, and means it differently than most people do.
Baby Aleks arrives next, carried from the house by Fanny, with the brisk, cheerful competence of someone who genuinely loves her job.
Aleks is two months old now and has perfected the art of being devastatingly cute at maximum volume.
He’s awake, dark eyes blinking at the world with the baffled indignation of someone who didn’t ask to be brought to a garden party and would like to speak to a manager.
“There he is.” I reach for him immediately.
Fanny passes him over the way women who work with babies do—one arm, no hesitation—and I settle him against my hip…
or what’s left of my hip, given the bump.
He fits into the curve of my arm like he was designed for it.
His weight against me, his tiny fingers gripping the fabric of my dress, the clean powdery smell of him making me smile.
“Hello, little man. You’re looking very handsome. ”
He responds by grabbing a fistful of my hair and trying to eat it.
“He does that,” Fanny says, apologetic.
“I know. He gets it from his father. The grabbing, not the hair-eating.” I kiss his forehead. Aleks is Arkady’s son—whatever the biology says, whatever the paternity questions that remain unspoken, this boy is his. Arkady chose him. That matters more than blood.
Guests trickle in over the next half hour.
Arkady’s business associates, a few of his cousins from the outer Laurov orbit—the ones who stayed clear of Gavriil’s operations and now exist in the gray zone between legitimate wealth and carefully forgotten origins.
There’s food being circulated—tiny, ridiculous canapés that are more architecture than sustenance—and champagne, and a jazz trio playing something low and warm near the marquee.
I’m standing by the drinks table, sparkling water in hand, watching Yanis attempt small talk with one of the caterers, when I see another car pull through the gates. Black sedan. Tinted windows. One of Arkady’s fleet.
The door opens, and a pair of trainers hits the gravel. Then jeans. Then a bright yellow jacket that could be spotted from space.
Diane.
My best friend straightens up, pushes her sunglasses onto her head, and surveys Ashwater Heights with the expression of someone who has walked onto the wrong film set and decided to stay anyway.
“Oh my God,” she announces to nobody in particular. “I know you told me it was big, but this is obscene, Mira. This is obscenely big. This place has wings.”
I’m already moving. My body knows what to do, it’s crossing the lawn, bump and all, arms out, making the high-pitched sound women make when they haven’t seen their best friend in weeks, and the world has gone completely sideways in the interim.
“Diane!”
She meets me halfway. We collide in a hug that’s made complicated by my stomach and her enormous handbag, but happens anyway, fierce and ungraceful and perfect.
“Look at you!” She pulls back, both hands on my shoulders, her eyes dropping to my belly. “You’re getting so big! In a gorgeous way. In a glowing, radiant, earth-mother way. But also big.”
“Thanks. That’s what every pregnant woman dreams of hearing.”
“I’m your best friend. I’m contractually obligated to be honest.” She cups my belly with both hands, unasked, unapologetic. “Hello, baby. It’s Auntie Diane. I’ve already bought you three outfits and a stuffed giraffe taller than your mother.”
“How are you here?” I’m beaming so hard my face hurts. “I didn’t… I wasn’t told— “
“That would be your future husband.” Diane jerks her thumb back toward the house.
“He called me two days ago. Voice like a Bond villain, very serious. ‘Miss MacFarlane, I’m sending a car.’ I said, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘Mirabel needs her friend. Saturday. The car will arrive at noon. Please don’t be late.
’ And then he hung up. No goodbye. No small talk.
Just… click. Terrifying and weirdly chivalrous. ”
I turn. Arkady is on the terrace, watching. He’s come outside while I wasn’t looking, leaning against the stone balustrade, arms folded, the ghost of something satisfied in his expression.
“You arranged this,” I say to him.
“Da.”
“You called my best friend and sent a car.”
“I sent the car with Volodya. She was collected at eleven forty-five.”
“Why?”
He looks at me intently, and for a moment, the rest of the party disappears— the music, the guests, the clinking glasses—and it’s just the two of us in the space between the question and the answer.
“I did it to make you happy,” he says. One corner of his mouth lifts. Barely, just enough to be infuriating… the closest this man gets to showing off.
I have to blink very fast to keep my mascara intact.
“Come here.” I pull Diane toward the terrace. “Diane, this is Arkady. Arkady, Diane. Be nice to each other.”
“Miss MacFarlane.” He extends his hand. Formal. Correct.
Diane takes it, looks him dead in the face, and says: “You’ve got about thirty seconds to impress me before I start the interrogation. I’ve prepared questions. There are seventeen of them.”
Arkady doesn’t miss a beat. “I’ll have Stefan schedule the debrief.”
Diane blinks. Then her face splits into a grin. “I like him,” she says to me. “He’s weird, but I like him.”
“I know.”
“Now introduce me to your sister before I combust.”
I take Diane’s hand and lead her across the lawn to where Debra is sitting with Yanis, a glass of sparkling water balanced on her knee.
The introduction is careful. Debra stiffens at new people, always does, the reflexive tightening of someone whose trust was destroyed systematically.
But Diane, who has no filter, no fear, and the emotional intelligence of someone who reads people the way some people read books, gets it immediately.
She doesn’t hug Debra. Doesn’t grab her hands.
She just smiles, says, “You look exactly like her, but your eyebrows are slightly better, which we’re going to pretend I didn’t notice,” and sits down beside her at exactly the right distance.
Debra laughs, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
I stand there watching my two worlds merge.
My before-Arkady life and my after-Arkady life, colliding on a rolling lawn in the garden of my former workplace, and something in my chest unravels.
Not with pain. With the opposite of pain.
With the realization that I have people.
A sister. A best friend. A man who calls my bestie and sends cars and says I did it to make you happy, like happiness is something he’s still learning how to build, but is determined to get right.
The afternoon settles into something golden. The kind of day that feels borrowed—too good, too warm, too complete—like the universe made an accounting error and hasn’t noticed yet.
Aleks gets passed around like a tiny celebrity.
Stefan holds him with the enormous gentleness of a man whose hands could crush a skull but prefer, at this moment, to support an infant’s head.
Natalia takes photographs. Julia sits on the lawn near the fountain and dangles her fingers in the water, and I catch Debra watching her with a quiet, protective attention that has nothing to do with mothering and everything to do with kinship.
Fanny hovers close, professional and watchful, but Aleks is content—gurgling, gripping fingers, drooling on Stefan’s Savile Row lapel without a shred of remorse.