34. Tasha
TASHA
"Say it again," I told him, "and mean it a little less like an order."
He didn't say it again. He stood there in front of the blueprints with his jaw working and his hands loose at his sides, and I watched him choose silence instead, which somehow made it worse, because silence from Grisha had never once meant nothing.
"That's what I thought," I said, and walked out of the war room before either of us could make it worse right there in front of the board, past the red pins and the exit routes he'd redrawn twice, down the stairs and out into the corridor that led toward his quarters, because I wasn't finished, not by half, and I needed somewhere that wasn't full of Sasha's carefully arranged furniture to say the rest of it.
He followed me. Of course he followed me. In twenty years, he had never once let anything walk away from him without accounting for where it went, and here I was, walking away from him on purpose for the first time since the garage.
"Tasha." He caught up to me outside his own door, and I turned on him there, in the narrow corridor with its runner carpet and its dim wall sconces, because I didn't have it in me to wait until we were somewhere more private for what I was about to say.
"You want to know why 'stay home' hit the way it did?
" My voice came out steadier than I felt, which surprised me even as I heard it.
"It's not because I don't understand you're scared.
I do. I've known it since the hospital, since the garage, since the night you told me about the ballroom.
I understand exactly what that fear is made of. "
"Then help me understand why that isn't enough to make you listen to it."
"Because understanding your fear isn't the same as agreeing to live inside it.
" I pressed my back against the wall, needing something solid behind me for what came next.
"You don't protect people, Grisha. You erase yourself around them until there's nothing left for anyone to lose.
You did it with Elena's case for eight years, sitting on a file instead of touching it because touching it meant risking finding something worse.
You did it two weeks ago, walking into a garage alone instead of calling for backup, because backup meant someone else might get hurt for your sake.
And now you're doing it again, trying to fold yourself so small around this plan that there's no scenario at the gala where you actually have to stand in a room and let something bad happen where you can't stop it. "
"That's not the same thing."
"It's exactly the same thing. It's the only move you've ever let yourself make.
" I heard my own voice shake and let it, because pretending to be steady had never once gotten either of us anywhere honest. "That's not love, Grisha.
That's disappearing with extra steps. You don't ask people to leave because you don't trust them.
You ask them to leave because some part of you has already decided you're the danger, and if you can just get small enough, quiet enough, controlled enough, nobody standing near you ever has to pay for what you are. "
He didn't answer right away, and I watched something move behind his eyes that looked almost like recognition, quick and unwelcome, the kind of truth a person registers and immediately wishes they hadn't.
"If I stop trying to keep the people I love out of the way of what wants to hurt them," he said finally, low, "I don't know what's left of me. That's the job I gave myself the day I buried her. It's the only one I've ever been good at."
Something in that landed harder than I expected, an echo I recognized from a letter I'd read out loud in my own mother's kitchen weeks before.
My grandfather had said almost the same thing, in his own handwriting, across a lifetime and an ocean.
I chose to be a coward quietly, and call it protecting my family.
Grisha wasn't a coward, not in the ways that mattered, but the shape of it was identical: a man deciding that shrinking himself down to nothing was the price of keeping the people he loved breathing.
I had forgiven my grandfather that choice at a kitchen table with cold tea going warm between two cups.
I was not going to forgive it quite so easily standing in a hallway with a man I still had a chance to reach while he was alive to hear it.
"That's not an answer. That's a smaller version of the same mistake.
" I felt something in my chest go very still, the particular stillness of watching a person confirm exactly what you'd hoped they'd argue against. "You just told me, out loud, that being needed by someone who might get hurt is the only thing that makes you feel like you exist. Do you understand how that sounds?
You're not asking me to stay safe. You're asking me to let you keep disappearing into being useful, because the alternative is finding out who you are when nobody needs protecting. "
"Maybe that's true." His voice had gone rough, stripped of its usual control. "Maybe I don't know who I am without something to stand between. What do you want me to do with that tonight, Tasha? Rebuild twenty years of it before breakfast?"
"I don't want you to rebuild anything tonight.
I want you to hear what I'm telling you, and I don't think you can, not right now, not with the gala pressing in on both of us and Kessler's name on every wall in that room upstairs.
" I pushed off the wall, and my legs felt steadier than the rest of me had any right to expect.
"I love you. I need you to understand that everything I'm about to do, I'm doing because I love you, not despite it. "
"What are you about to do?"
"I'm going to go stay with Frankie for a while."
The corridor went very quiet, the kind of quiet that has weight to it, and I watched the words land on him the way a blow lands on someone who saw it coming and still couldn't get out of the way in time.
"You're leaving."
"I'm stepping back from a house where the man I love thinks the only way to love me is to erase himself into a shield.
I'm not ending this. I need you to hear that clearly, because I can already see you deciding I am, and I'm not.
" My hands had started shaking, and I let them, because hiding it would have been one more layer of the same lie we'd both been telling for weeks.
"I'm giving both of us room to figure out whether you actually want a partner, or whether you just want someone worth disappearing for.
Those aren't the same thing, Grisha, even if they've felt like the same thing to you for eight years. "
"I don't know how to let you go right now. Not with the gala a week away. Not with Kessler's people already watching everything that moves near this house."
"Then that's something else you're going to have to sit with, because I can't stay in that cottage tonight and pretend we solved anything by shouting the truth at each other in a hallway.
" I said it as gently as I could manage, which wasn't very, because gentleness had mostly burned off somewhere between the war room and here.
"This isn't a punishment. It's not a strategy.
It's just true. I need to not be standing this close to you for a little while, so neither of us mistakes proximity for the problem we're actually supposed to be fixing. "
He reached for my hand, and I let him take it, because some things don't stop being true just because you're furious inside them.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For tonight. For the order. For all of it."
"I know you are. I believe you." I squeezed his hand once before I let it go. "That doesn't change what I need right now."
I walked back to my own cottage alone, and he let me have those few minutes, at least, following at a distance that felt like the first honest thing he'd offered me all night.
I packed faster than I expected to once I got there, throwing enough for a week into an old overnight bag, folding in whatever my hands found first because thinking too carefully about any single item felt like an invitation to sit down on the bed and cry instead of finish.
The strap was already cutting a thin, familiar line into my shoulder by the time I zipped it shut, the same ache I remembered from carrying my grandfather's trunk out to my mother's car, and I noticed the echo and hated it a little, another weight I was choosing to carry alone instead of asking anyone to help me lift.
Grisha stood in the doorway the whole time, not stopping me, not helping either, just present in the particular, useless way of a man who understood he had forfeited the right to make this easier.
"Call me when you get there," he said at the door. "Not because I'm checking. Because I'll worry either way, and you not calling won't stop that, it'll just make it worse."
"I'll call." I stopped in front of him, close enough to feel the warmth coming off him even now, and pressed my mouth briefly to his jaw, the way I had that first night in the kitchen with two days of stubble under my palm.
"This isn't goodbye. I need you to actually believe that, not just say you do. "
"I believe you." His voice cracked on it, small and honest. "I don't believe I've earned it yet. That's different."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't try to give him one. I stepped past him into the dark, the bag heavy against my hip, and pulled the cottage door shut behind me softer than the moment deserved, a quiet, careful click instead of the slam some other part of me might have wanted.
The drive to the gate felt longer than it was.
I watched the compound recede in the mirror, the security lights along the wall catching my headlights and throwing them back at me in long white sweeps across the drive, and somewhere behind one of those lit windows was a man learning, slowly and at enormous cost to both of us, that love wasn't supposed to look like disappearing.
Frankie opened her door in pajama pants and yesterday's mascara, took one look at my face and the bag on my shoulder, and didn't ask a single question before she pulled me inside.
She got me as far as her couch, put a mug of something warm into my hands that I didn't ask about and didn't finish, and sat with her shoulder pressed against mine while I told her everything, in the wrong order, half of it through tears I hadn't planned on letting her see.
"You did the right thing," she said, once I'd finally run out of words. "I know it doesn't feel like it right now."
"It doesn't feel like anything right now. It just feels like a hallway and a bag and a door closing."
"That's usually what the right thing feels like at first." She squeezed my hand once, hard, and didn't let go. "Sleep here as long as you need. I'll make up the guest room properly in the morning. Tonight you're staying right here on this couch where I can see you."
I let her steer me under a blanket that smelled like her apartment, lavender and old books, and lay there a long time listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a building that wasn't the compound, cars passing on a street instead of gravel under boots, and thought about a man standing alone in a cottage doorway learning the exact shape of what he'd built his whole life to avoid.
The separation neither of us wanted had started, and there was no version of tonight where that stopped being true no matter how badly I wished it were otherwise.