14. Tasha
TASHA
Iwoke with my mouth already halfway into a smile and no memory of putting it there, which should have warned me the whole day was going to be a problem.
I lay in the guest cottage bed for a full minute just breathing, cataloguing the ceiling the way I catalogued everything else in my life lately, and somewhere around the second minute I gave up pretending I was thinking about the ceiling at all.
I was thinking about a hallway. I was thinking about a hand at the side of my face and a mouth that had gone from careful to certain in the space of one breath, and I lay there grinning at nothing like a woman who had misplaced several years of her own good sense overnight.
I showered longer than I needed to. I picked out a sweater I did not usually reach for, told myself it was because the morning had turned cool, and knew even as I told myself that it was a lie so thin I could see through it from across the room.
By the time I walked the short path from the cottage to the main house, the sun was doing something extravagant over the east lawn, and I caught myself smiling at a hedge, an actual hedge, for no reason except that the world had rearranged itself sometime after midnight and I hadn't finished adjusting to the new shape of it.
The breakfast room sat just off the kitchen, smaller than the formal dining room down the hall, sunnier too, with tall windows on two sides that let the morning in without any of the ceremony the big table demanded.
A round table stood near the far window instead of the long one built for eighteen, and it always felt more like a room people actually lived in than a room built to impress anyone.
I stepped inside and found Grisha already there, standing at the sideboard with a mug in one hand, and the sight of him did something embarrassing to my chest before I'd even managed a greeting.
"Morning," I said, and heard my own voice come out a half tone higher than usual.
"Morning." He didn't look at me right away, which was unlike him, and when he did his eyes caught mine and held a beat too long before he found something urgent to do with the coffee pot. "There's coffee. It's been sitting a while."
"How long is a while?"
"Long enough that I wouldn't recommend it.
" He poured me a cup anyway, and I took it anyway, and we stood there for a second like two people who had never learned how to be in a room together, which was absurd, because we had spent two weeks sitting shoulder to shoulder over ledgers without either of us forgetting how to speak.
I sat down at the round table and wrapped both hands around the mug, and the sun caught the ring the heat had left on the wood the last time someone had done exactly this, a pale gold circle the light turned almost bright for a second, before I moved my hands and broke it.
The coffee tasted the way he'd promised, bitter and a little burnt at the edges, and I kept drinking it, mostly so I'd have somewhere to look that wasn't his mouth.
"You're up early," I said.
"I'm always up early."
"Right. Of course you are." I turned my mug a quarter turn on the table for no reason at all. "I meant you're standing at the sideboard instead of sitting down. That part's new."
He looked at the chair across from me like it had personally challenged him to something, and then he sat in it, and the tension in his shoulders eased half an inch once he had. "Better?"
"Marginally."
Something eased across his face at that, quick and unguarded, gone before I could catch the whole shape of it, and I felt the warmth of it land somewhere under my ribs and stay there.
Neither of us said anything about the corridor.
We didn't need to. It sat in the room with us anyway, unmentioned and enormous, in the way he kept glancing at my mouth and then away, in the way I kept finding his hand on the table and having to remind myself not to reach for it in front of the coffee pot like a teenager.
Baba Olya came through the kitchen door with a tray balanced on one hip, and I watched her take in the whole scene in a single sweep, the two of us sitting closer to the same side of a round table than the geometry strictly required, the untouched second cup of coffee, whatever it was on both our faces that we clearly thought we were hiding.
Her eyebrows did not move. Her mouth did not so much as twitch toward a smile.
She set down a plate of bread and a dish of butter with the exact same brisk economy she used every single morning, straightened the same fork that never needed straightening, and said nothing at all.
That silence was worse than anything she could have said out loud.
I had braced for a comment, for the eyebrow, for some version of skinny girl delivered with a knowing look aimed straight at the middle of my chest, and instead I got nothing, just Baba Olya moving around the table refilling a water glass nobody had asked her to refill, humming low and tuneless under her breath like the most ordinary morning in the world was happening in front of her.
She looked at Grisha once, briefly, the kind of look a person gives a grown man she has known since he had all his scars still healing, and something passed over her face too fast for me to name it before she turned back toward the kitchen.
"She knows," I said quietly, once she'd gone.
"She's known for twenty minutes," Grisha said. "Maybe less."
"She didn't say anything."
"That's how you'll know it matters to her.
If she didn't care, she'd have said plenty.
" He reached for the bread, tore off a piece he didn't seem particularly interested in eating, and turned it over in his fingers instead.
"She's been feeding me alone at that long table for years.
She isn't going to make a joke out of the first morning she didn't have to. "
I sat with that a moment, the ordinary clatter of a pot from the kitchen drifting through the open door, and felt something in my chest go soft and a little overwhelmed, the way it always did when someone who loved you quietly showed it by not saying the thing everyone else would have said.
I hadn't expected to be moved by an old woman's silence over a butter dish. I was anyway.
We had maybe ten more minutes of that, ten minutes of stolen looks and coffee gone cold and small talk that kept collapsing under its own weight, before Sasha appeared in the doorway with a folder under one arm and an expression that had none of the morning's softness in it at all.
I felt the whole room recalibrate around him the way it always did, some instinct in both of us shifting from private to professional before he'd said a word.
"Good, you're both here," he said. "Saves me finding you twice."
"That sounds ominous," I said.
"It should." He came in and set the folder on the table between us, and I noticed his hand rested on it a second longer than it needed to, as if he was bracing himself as much as us. "The gala's moving up. Three weeks from today instead of six."
The words landed in the room like something physical. I set my mug down harder than I meant to, and across the table I watched Grisha go very quiet in the particular way he did when he was already three steps ahead of whatever came next.
"Three weeks," I repeated. "You had six weeks locked. You told me so yourself, less than two weeks ago."
"I did. And I meant it." Sasha's jaw worked once before he continued, the closest thing to visible frustration I had ever watched cross his face.
"Volkonsky's foundation is our largest single pledge this year, and their board chair informed my office yesterday afternoon that a commitment she can't move is taking her out of the country within the month.
Either we host the gala before she leaves, or we host it without her checkbook in the room. I chose the date."
"Can you push back?" Grisha asked. "Explain the timeline, ask for two more weeks instead of losing five?"
"I tried. Twice." Sasha's mouth flattened. "She was gracious about it. She was also very clear. Three weeks, or we lose a pledge large enough to fund half of next year's restoration budget on its own. I'm not willing to gamble that away over a scheduling preference."
I did the math without meaning to, the way I did math on every job, dates and deliverables lining up against each other in my head like columns in a ledger.
Nine paintings still needed full condition reports, down from fourteen a few days ago.
The pace looked good on paper. It wasn't. Most of those days had gone to the investigation, not the paintings.
Five of the nine still needed provenance chased down through decades of records that did not want to be found.
And underneath all of it, unspoken, sat the Keeper, the ledgers, and the two sets of initials that traced back to a hand nobody had identified yet.
"That's not just a catalogue problem," I said, looking at Grisha instead of Sasha. "That's everything. That's the whole investigation compressed into a third of the time we thought we had."
"I know what it is," Sasha said, and for a second the controlled unhurried version of him slipped just far enough that I could see something underneath it, something closer to worry than I had ever caught on his face before.
"I'm not telling you to slow down and be careful.
I'm telling you there isn't time left for slow and careful anymore.
Whatever this is, whoever R.K. was, I need it settled.
Or at least understood well enough to manage, before I stand up in front of three hundred donors and put that river painting on a wall behind me. "
"And if we can't get there in three weeks?" Grisha asked, quiet and level, the question of a man already running contingencies in his head.
"Then we manage what we have and I make decisions I'd rather not make blind.
" Sasha looked between us, and something in his face eased just slightly, a flicker of relief he didn't let stay long enough to be called that.
"I trust both of you to tell me where things actually stand, even when that means admitting you don't have every answer yet.
I don't trust anyone else in this house with that kind of honesty. Three weeks. I'm sorry it isn't more."
He picked the folder back up, tapped it once against his palm like a man closing a door in his own head, and left the way he'd come, his footsteps fading down the hall toward the formal side of the house.
The room felt different once he'd gone, the sunlight through the tall windows suddenly doing less work than it had ten minutes earlier, the bread and butter sitting forgotten between us.
"Three weeks," I said again, mostly to hear if it sounded any less impossible the second time. It didn't.
"We'll need to move the catalogue faster than either of us planned," Grisha said, already turning it over out loud, the way he did when a problem needed handling instead of feeling.
"I can pull two more men off routine rounds and put them on records with you, if that helps you move through the provenance work quicker. "
"It would help enormously and probably drive me insane at the same time, but yes.
" I dragged both hands down my face and laughed, short and a little disbelieving.
"Three weeks to catalogue what's left, chase down R.K.
, and figure out whether a man who terrifies me is circling that painting because he already knows something we don't."
"We'll manage the timeline," he said, and I believed him the way I believed very few people when they said things like that, because I had watched him manage worse timelines than this one without ever once losing his footing.
Then his expression shifted, the urgency of the last ten minutes settling back to make room for something else, a thought he'd clearly been sitting on since before Sasha ever walked in.
He set down the piece of bread he'd been turning over and never eaten, and folded his hands on the table like a man about to say something he'd rehearsed.
"I would like to court you properly," he said, entirely serious, entirely old-fashioned, like the sentence had walked straight out of one of the paintings we'd spent two weeks cataloguing.
I stared at him for a second, and then I laughed, half startled and half delighted, the whole heavy weight of the last ten minutes cracking open just enough to let something lighter through. "Is that a real sentence people still say?"
He opened his mouth to answer, something already forming behind his eyes, careful and thorough the way he answered everything.
"Yes," I said, before he could finish. "Also yes to the courting."
He looked at me across the ruins of a breakfast neither of us had properly eaten, and whatever crossed his face then was fuller than anything I'd seen from him yet, unguarded in a way I had maybe caught twice since I'd met him.
Outside the tall windows the morning kept going on without any regard for gala dates or old ledgers or men who watched paintings the way other men watched exits, sunlight pooling slow and gold across the wood between us, and for one full minute neither of us said anything else at all, because for once neither of us needed to.