48. Tasha
TASHA
The cherry trees were Frankie's fault, technically, though Grisha would never admit it out loud in front of her.
She had mentioned once, months ago, half joking, that a wedding without at least one tree in bloom felt like a missed opportunity, and three weeks later there had been a truck in the drive and a crew of confused landscapers arguing in two languages about root depth and soil acidity.
Nobody would tell me how many calls it had taken to find trees mature enough to bloom on schedule, and I had stopped asking once I understood the answer would only make me love him more than I already did.
Now the whole aisle ran under a corridor of pink, petals coming loose in the breeze and catching in my hair, in my mother's hair, in the lace at the edge of my sleeve, drifting down onto the folding chairs and the grass and the shoulders of guests who kept brushing them off without ever quite managing to stay clear of them.
I understood, walking through it, that he had built me an entire season just to make sure I'd remember this one properly.
My mother walked me the last stretch alone, my hand tucked into her elbow, and she kept glancing sideways at me like she was checking I was still real.
"You are not allowed to cry before I do," she said under her breath. "I have been rehearsing my face for a week."
"Your face is already going."
"It is not." It was. Her chin had that particular wobble it got right before she lost the argument with herself entirely, and by the time we reached the end of the aisle she had given up rehearsing anything and was simply crying, unguarded, the good kind, and I found I couldn't be angry about it because my own eyes had already gone the same way looking at Grisha standing there in the one suit I had never once seen him check for exits in.
Frankie caught my eye from the second row and mouthed something that might have been you look insane or might have been I'm so happy, and beside her Sergei, flown in for the occasion and clearly out of his depth around this much emotion in one place, was patting her shoulder with the stiff, alarmed gentleness of a man who had never before witnessed his business partner cry in public.
Sasha stood beside Grisha as his second, steady in a way that made the whole front of the aisle feel anchored, and Baba Olya sat in the front row on the other side with a handkerchief already out, twenty minutes before anyone had said a single vow.
The officiant kept it short, because Grisha had asked for short, and when it came time for him to speak he didn't reach for anything prepared.
"I spent a long time thinking I didn't get to want things," he said, looking at me and nobody else in that whole crowded garden.
"You didn't ask me to want them again. You just made it impossible not to.
I intend to spend the rest of my life proving that was the best thing that ever happened to me. "
"You already proved it," I said, before the officiant could even ask for my half of it. "Every day since September."
"Since September," he repeated, quiet, like he was setting the two words down somewhere he intended to keep them. "I intend to make that the shortest sentence in this whole ceremony and still mean every part of it more than anything I say after."
The officiant, visibly caught off guard by a groom who had apparently written his own material after all, abandoned the printed card and just nodded at us to keep going.
Somewhere behind me my mother made a sound that wasn't quite a sob and wasn't quite a laugh, and Frankie, two rows back, gave up entirely and let Sergei hand her his handkerchief instead of her own, which he had apparently packed specifically for this purpose.
The reception moved outside once the light started going gold, long tables set under strings of bulbs that hadn't been switched on yet, and Frankie caught my arm on the walk over, tugging me half a step out of the flow of people, her eyes still red rimmed and entirely unrepentant about it.
"I need you to know I was wrong," she said, without any preamble at all. "About the rich family, the private security, all of it. I believe my exact words, back in September, were something about documentaries and people who ask too many questions and aren't around to answer them."
"I remember. I believe you used the word 'documentaries' four separate times."
"I was right to be nervous. I want that on the record too, apparently, since that seems to be the theme of today." She hugged me hard and fast, the kind of hug with eight years of friendship packed into it. "I was right to be nervous and wrong about basically everything that actually mattered."
"Sergei cried before you did."
"Sergei came prepared with a whole plan, is what he did. That man does not do anything without a contingency, including grief." She wiped under her own eyes again, laughing at herself now. "I'm happy for you. I don't think I've ever meant three words more in my life."
I had maybe four minutes of peace after that before Fedya commandeered the microphone with the confidence of a man who had clearly been planning this for weeks.
"So," he said, unfolding a laminated sheet of paper the size of a placemat, "I made a timeline."
"Fedya." Grisha said it flat, already resigned.
"You don't get a veto on this, boss, I checked with Tasha first." He held the laminated sheet up for the crowd, an actual timeline with dates and tiny hand-drawn stars, and somewhere in the audience Baba Olya laughed so hard she had to set down her fork.
"Exhibit one. Day one. Boss corners a strange woman in a storage room and interrogates her about a painting.
Everyone in this house knew by dinner that he was in trouble.
He didn't know yet. That's the tragedy of it, honestly, watching a man fall in love and mistake it for a security concern for three straight weeks. "
"Eleven minutes," Frankie whispered to me later, checking her phone. "He ran eleven full minutes and included a footnote about the garden."
He did include a footnote about the garden, delivered with real solemnity, something about a raccoon and a hedge and how he personally believed the raccoon deserved an invitation it would never receive.
By the time he got to the part about the wrist escape lesson he'd given me, the entire crowd was somewhere between crying and howling, Baba Olya loudest of all, wiping her eyes with the same handkerchief she'd been saving for the vows.
"Exhibit two," Fedya continued, flipping the laminated sheet over to reveal a second, equally alarming timeline on the back, "the training yard.
She put me on my back in front of the boss in under a minute, and I would like the record to reflect that I let her, and also that I did not let her, and that both of those things are true depending on which one of us you ask. "
"You did not let me," I called out, and the crowd laughed hard enough that Fedya had to wait a full ten seconds before he could continue.
"To the boss," he finished, raising his glass, "who spent twenty years telling everyone else how to survive an ambush and then got taken out completely by one woman with a clipboard. We love you. Try not to check the exits at your own wedding."
Grisha lifted his glass back at him, something warm and unguarded moving across his face that I doubted Fedya had ever actually seen aimed at him before, and the table erupted again.
I found Baba Olya an hour later cornering my mother by the dessert table, one thumb dragged through the frosting on the cake's edge like she'd been personally inspecting it for quality, and from the set of her shoulders I understood I had walked into the middle of something.
"I called it in September," Baba Olya was saying, completely unbothered by the frosting on her thumb. "I want that on the record, Katya. I told Dmitri, I told the girl who does the flowers, I told the dog, all in September, before either of them had admitted anything to themselves."
"You did not tell me this in September." My mother laughed, wiping under one eye. "You have never once spoken to me before today."
"I called it anyway. A woman does not need to speak to a stranger to know a thing.
" Baba Olya licked the frosting off her thumb with the satisfaction of a woman who had never once been wrong about anything in her life.
"Your daughter walked through that gate looking like she wanted to argue with the whole house, and he looked at her like a man who had already lost. I fed enough people in this kitchen to know what that particular look means.
Eat some cake. You are too thin for a woman who raised someone this stubborn. "
My mother gave up arguing and took the cake.
Sasha found me a little later by the edge of the dance floor, his own glass mostly untouched, watching Grisha across the lawn with an expression I hadn't seen on him before, something quieter than pride.
"I've known him twenty years," he said, without preamble, the way he said most things that mattered to him.
"I hired a boy who thought the only thing left for him to be useful for was standing between other people and whatever wanted to hurt them.
I let him believe that, for longer than I'm proud of, because it was convenient and because he was good at it. "
"He's still good at it."
"He is. But he's also, as of about four hours ago, a married man who cried during his own vows in front of eighty people, which the Grisha I hired twenty years ago would have found genuinely alarming.
" Sasha's voice roughened, something warm breaking through the usual composure.
"He didn't think he got to have this again. I'm glad he was wrong."
"Me too," I said, and meant it more than I'd meant almost anything.
"Go dance with your husband." He nudged my shoulder, gentle, already turning back toward the crowd. "I've got a toast to make in ten minutes and I intend to keep it shorter than Fedya's, which should not be a difficult bar to clear."
"Dmitri says he's got money on you going over anyway."
"Dmitri has been wrong about everything since the Kessler business, tell him I said so." The corner of his mouth twitched, brief and real, almost a smile. "Go find your husband. I'll deal with Dmitri after."
He kept his word. His toast ran under two minutes, no laminated sheet, no timeline, just a raised glass and the same line he'd already given me privately, delivered to the reception this time, and it landed harder in front of a crowd than it had standing quietly at the edge of the lawn.
Grisha's jaw worked once, hard, and he didn't try to hide it.
I stayed there a moment longer after Sasha walked off to find his microphone, just watching.
My mother had abandoned the dessert table and was deep in conversation with Baba Olya now, the two of them bent over the same plate of cake like old conspirators, and somewhere past them Fedya was reenacting the training yard takedown for a small, delighted crowd that included, unfortunately, the officiant.
Frankie and Sergei had claimed a corner of the lawn for themselves, her wine glass gesturing wildly through some story that had Sergei laughing despite himself, and Grisha stood near the cherry trees talking to Dmitri with the easy, unguarded posture of a man who had finally stopped counting the exits in his own backyard.
Two families that had started this year as strangers to each other were tangled together now across every table, and I understood, watching it unfold without needing to lift a finger to cause it, that this was the whole point Grisha had been building toward with every quiet, careful thing he'd done since the garden.
The lights came on all at once as the last of the color went out of the sky, strings of bulbs overhead flaring warm against the dark in a single unified moment that pulled a small collective sound out of the crowd, delighted and a little startled, like the night itself had decided to join the celebration on cue.
"Someone's first dance," the band leader said, and Grisha was already crossing the grass toward me before the words finished landing.
He took my hand, drew me in, and we moved slow under all that new light, cherry petals still drifting down out of the dark overhead, catching gold for a second under each string of bulbs before they landed.
I could hear my mother crying again somewhere behind us, and Fedya narrating the moment to anyone near him like a man doing color commentary on the happiest event of his life, and Baba Olya telling someone, anyone, everyone, that she had called this in September.
Frankie had Sergei's borrowed handkerchief pressed to her face again, and Sasha stood at the edge of it all with his glass finally empty, watching the loud, overflowing mess of us like a man counting something precious instead of counting exits for once.
"Regrets?" Grisha asked, low, just for me, his hand warm at the small of my back.
"Only that it took us so long to get here."
"We got here." He kissed me then, unhurried, right there in front of the whole loud, laughing, thoroughly overinvolved family that had somehow become mine too, and I felt the whole night settle around us, warm and bright and entirely, finally, ours.