4. Tasha
TASHA
Hours before Grisha caught me in the storage room and walked me back to my own door like a suspect being escorted off a property, the evening had started ordinary enough.
The cottage sat at the edge of the grounds where the manicured lawn gave up trying and let the trees take over, a small square building with green shutters and a slate roof that looked older than everything else on the property combined.
Someone had left a lamp on for me. I hesitated on the threshold for a second before I made myself go in, the kind of pause where your body finally admits how tired it is and your brain has to catch up.
Inside it smelled like cedar and lemon oil and, underneath that, like someone else entirely.
It wasn't unpleasant, just not mine. A quilt lay folded at the foot of the bed with a precision I would never manage twice.
A framed photograph of a wedding I didn't recognize sat on the dresser, the bride's dress a style from decades ago.
I sat on the edge of the mattress and listened to the quiet, loud in its own way after a day spent trailing after a man who watched me like I might steal the wallpaper.
There was no gallery hum, no clipped footsteps two paces behind mine, just the tick of an unfamiliar radiator and, somewhere outside, the low murmur of the bay working at the shoreline.
My whole body ached in the specific way that comes from holding yourself carefully around strangers for ten straight hours.
My phone buzzed once with a text from Frankie that said only "well?
?" and I didn't have the energy to answer it yet.
I got as far as unzipping my duffel before someone knocked on the doorframe of the open door, three brisk raps, and a woman's voice came in ahead of the rest of her.
"You. Skinny girl."
She was maybe seventy, built like she'd spent her whole life carrying things other people couldn't lift, silver hair pinned back so severely it looked load-bearing.
Flour dusted one forearm, and her expression suggested she had already decided several things about me and none of them were up for debate.
"I was going to unpack," I said, which came out sounding like an apology.
"Unpack later. Sit. Eat first, questions later.
That is how you survive this house." She delivered it like directions to the highway, a plain fact of the terrain, nothing open for debate.
Then she turned and walked off toward the main house kitchen without checking to see if I'd follow, because apparently she already knew I would.
I followed.
The kitchen was nothing like the rest of the compound.
The gallery wing was all hushed lighting and climate control, the kind of place where you lowered your voice without meaning to.
This room had a scarred wooden table long enough to seat twelve, copper pots hanging from hooks, and a pot on the stove throwing off steam that smelled like butter going brown and dill and something green underneath it.
My stomach answered before my mouth could.
"Sit," she said again, pointing at a chair with a wooden spoon like she was sentencing me to it.
"I really don't want to be any trouble, Mrs..."
"Olya. Baba Olya. Everybody calls me this, you will too, sit.
" She ladled something into a bowl before I'd finished lowering myself into the chair, a soup the color of a summer garden with dumplings floating in it, and set it down hard enough that a little sloshed over the rim.
"Eat. You have the look of someone who forgets. "
"Forgets what?"
"To eat. To sleep. To stop for one minute." She waved the spoon at me, taking in the whole of me in one sweep, my travel-wrinkled shirt, the pen still tucked behind my ear from hours of cataloguing. "I have seen this look before. It does not end well for the girl."
I laughed before I could stop myself, surprised by the sound of it after a day that hadn't given me much to laugh at. "It's a busy job, that's all."
"Mm." She sat down across from me without being invited by anyone, which struck me as fair since I hadn't invited myself either.
"Everyone in this house says that. Busy job.
Busy season. Busy family." She snorted. "You know what is under busy in this house?
More busy. Eat your soup before it gets cold and insults me. "
I ate. The soup was better than anything I'd had in months, tart with something like sorrel, the dumplings soft and a little peppery, and I hadn't realized how hollow I'd gone until the first spoonful hit and my hands started moving faster than my manners would normally allow.
She watched me eat the way you'd watch a plant finally take water, satisfied, unsurprised.
"This is incredible, by the way," I said around a mouthful. "What's in it?"
"Sorrel, dill, butter, patience. You cannot buy the last one, so pay attention." She nodded at the pot like it might misbehave if she looked away too long. "My mother taught me in a kitchen a quarter this size with half these pans. She would take one look at this stove and call it showing off."
"Is that a compliment or an insult?"
"With her, always both." She cut two more slices of bread without asking if I wanted them, which I did.
"This family, they like things that look old and expensive.
Half the paintings you counted today, older than my mother's pans.
I clean around them thirty years, I still do not understand why a man needs so many pictures of rivers. "
"You've been here thirty years?"
"Longer. I fed this family before some of them could hold a spoon.
" Something flickered behind her eyes, there and gone, like a door opened a crack and shut again before I could see into the room.
"I fed Grisha's mother in this kitchen too, God keep her.
That man does not eat enough either. Runs in the family, apparently, forgetting to eat, forgetting to...
" She waved the spoon again, vaguer this time, and didn't finish the sentence. "Never mind. Eat."
I wanted to ask what he forgot, exactly, but something in the set of her shoulders told me it wasn't mine to ask, not tonight, maybe not ever, and I tucked it away with everything else I wasn't ready to look at yet, in a drawer marked later.
She refilled my bowl without asking twice, put the extra bread in front of me with more butter than any doctor would recommend, and told me a story about a wedding she'd catered decades ago where the cake had collapsed and the groom's mother had cried harder over the cake than she had at the ceremony.
She was funny in a way that snuck up on you, deadpan and merciless and somehow completely without malice, and for the length of that meal nobody in the room was watching me for a wrong move.
It was the first time all day I hadn't felt like a stranger being tolerated.
I ate two bowls and most of the bread and only stopped because Baba Olya finally stood, declared me "less skinny, still too skinny," and shooed me back out into the dark with a container of leftovers pressed into my hands like a parting gift I hadn't earned.
Back in the cottage, I set the container in the tiny kitchenette fridge and sat on the bed with my phone, the quiet pressing in again now that I didn't have a stove to listen to. I called my mother because it was late enough that she'd be home and early enough that she wouldn't be asleep yet.
"Tashenka." Katya answered on the second ring, her voice warm and a little distracted, the sound of a television murmuring somewhere behind her. "How is the fancy job?"
"Long. Weird. There's a woman here who force fed me soup and I loved every second of it." I stretched out on top of the quilt. "How's everything with you?"
"Fine, fine. What is the job again, exactly? You said, but I forget."
"Cataloguing an art collection for a private family out in Brighton Beach. The Sorokins. Nothing exciting, just walking around with a clipboard and a camera."
"Sorokin." She repeated the name slowly, like she was testing whether it would hold her weight. "Big house?"
"Huge. Guest cottage, security gate, the works. Why, does the name ring a bell?"
"Everyone from the old neighborhood knows the name." She gave a short laugh that didn't sound like a laugh. "Brighton Beach is small, Tasha, you know this. Everyone knows everyone's business, even the parts they would rather nobody knew."
"That's an ominous way to describe a gala client."
The pause went on a beat too long, long enough that I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the call hadn't dropped.
"Mama?"
"I'm here." Her voice had changed, gone quietly careful, like she was picking her way across ice. "The Sorokins. That is... a big family. A family with a long memory."
"Is there something I should know? About them, I mean, before I go poking around their gallery asking about provenance."
"Just be careful which questions you ask." She said it fast, like she'd been holding it and it finally slipped. "That is all. It is a job. Do it, take their money, come home."
"Mama, that's a very specific thing to say for no reason."
"It is not for no reason, it is for good sense. Some families you do business with, and some families you do business with carefully." I heard a drawer slide shut in her kitchen, a little too firmly. "How is Frankie? Is the shop doing better?"
I let her change the subject because I knew that tone, had known it my whole life, the sound of a door closing gently enough that you almost didn't notice it had shut.
We talked another ten minutes about nothing, Frankie, rent, a cousin's engagement, and I said goodnight and hung up with a small cold feeling sitting under my ribs that the soup hadn't quite reached.
I sat at the little desk under the window and pulled out my grandfather's notebook, the leather gone soft and dark with handling, and set it open beside the photo I'd taken that afternoon of the river landscape, the one with the tiny mark worked into the underbrush at the base of a tree.
I'd told myself all day it might be nothing, a coincidence, a trick of tired eyes wanting to find a ghost of my grandfather in every corner of this job.
It wasn't nothing.
I lined the photo up against the page and there it was, the same three short strokes and the same curve closing them off, the same slight hook at the end where his pen always lifted a fraction too soon, a habit no forger and no coincidence could ever replicate exactly.
I'd watched him make that mark my whole childhood without knowing what it meant, on envelopes, on the backs of photographs, once on the inside cover of a book he gave me for my twelfth birthday.
Beside it in his cramped shorthand was a date more than thirty years old and three words I'd read a hundred times without understanding: river, delivered clean.
My grandfather hadn't just seen this painting once, decades ago, in passing. He had held it. He had moved it. He had marked it as his own, the way a courier marks a package nobody is supposed to trace back to anyone.
I closed the notebook slowly, my hand flat on the cover like I could keep the fact contained inside it a little longer.
Somewhere down the hall the radiator ticked again, patient, indifferent, and I sat there in the lamplight until the ache in my chest settled into something closer to resolve than grief.
Every instinct told me to walk this straight to Sasha Sorokin's office in the morning and lay it on his desk with a question mark.
Every other instinct, the one that had watched my mother's voice go careful over the phone twenty minutes ago, told me to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open until I understood exactly what I was holding.
I chose the second one. Quietly, for now, I was going to keep digging.