Epilogue
Natasha
The blueberry hits Beethoven on the nose.
He turns, walks three steps to the window, and sits facing the wall. Irina watches him go and finds this so interesting that she reaches for another blueberry immediately.
"That one is for eating," Nik says from the stove. He does not look up.
He is making something with caramelised onions and gruyere that has been filling the apartment all morning with a smell so good that even Billie has abandoned her position behind the radiator to come and stand in the kitchen doorway and reconsider her life choices.
He is also singing, off-key by exactly one note, the same Russian lullaby he sings every morning because it is the only thing that slows Irina down when she has decided to dismantle something.
I am at the kitchen island with my coffee and my laptop. I finished two quarterly projections before she woke up. This is a genuine personal triumph and I am privately very pleased about it.
The thing about Nikolai Astrovsky is that he is an excellent liar when the situation calls for it.
Right now, clearly, he does not feel the situation calls for it, because he is the most obvious person I have ever observed in real time.
He glances at his phone on the counter. Picks it up.
Sets it down. Glances again. He does all of this with the casual studied indifference of someone trying very hard to convince me he is not interested in his phone, which tells me he is absolutely riveted by it.
"You are going to burn those eggs," I say.
He is not burning anything. He rescues them in one movement, plates them without looking up, and sets a portion in front of me without asking because we have been doing this long enough that asking is not the grammar anymore.
The eggs are very good. I take a second helping.
He notices. He always notices everything.
Irina, satisfied that Beethoven is not returning, transfers her full attention back to the silicone mat on the high chair tray.
She does this every morning. She has never once succeeded in removing it.
She approaches the problem each time as though this is the morning physics will finally cooperate with her intentions.
"She has your stubbornness," I say.
"She has your focus," he shoots back.
Bowie is on the windowsill. Billie is in the kitchen doorway. Beethoven has his back to all of us.
The apartment is warm and the morning is unhurried and Nik is glancing at his phone again, his jaw doing the thing it does when he is containing something he finds very satisfying, and the whole picture of it, this man and this kitchen and this ridiculous child and these cats, produces something in my chest that I am not going to try to file or name.
I just let it be there. This is a skill I have been developing.
The evidence builds over the following week with the quiet, consistent quality of a pattern that I notice and am choosing, deliberately, not to investigate. White roses arrive on Tuesday with no occasion attached. Nik reserves white roses for specific occasions. There is no occasion.
Katya calls daily and he takes it in the bedroom with the door pulled most of the way shut.
When I call to confirm our Saturday reservation at the Chicago Grand, the host tells me the booking is a private arrangement, not the main dining room.
Thursday, Katya calls again, and Nik emerges from the bedroom looking pleased in a very controlled way, the specific look of someone who has just confirmed something important and is not going to let any of it show, except that all of it shows, because this man is a terrible actor when he is excited about something and I find this, to my own moderate surprise, completely charming.
I could audit this. I have every skill required. I choose not to open a spreadsheet on this particular project. Whatever he is building, he has built it with real care and real thought, and I find I want to simply show up on Saturday and see what he has made.
Saturday comes and he puts on the dark suit, the good one, the Italian one built specifically for him.
No tie. He never wears a tie and I stopped expecting it approximately a year ago and have been privately grateful ever since.
In the cab he looks out the window at Chicago in the dark and his jaw has the quality it gets when he is containing something good, not difficult, just good, and I watch the side of his face and say nothing.
"Where are we going?" I ask.
"Dinner," he says.
"At the Chicago Grand."
He turns his head and there is something in his face that is slightly undone, a quality I have seen maybe four times in two years, each time marking a moment he was not quite ready to put into words. "Yes," he says.
I leave it there.
The Meridian Ballroom is empty when the maitre d' opens the door and then quietly disappears behind us.
I stop walking because the room has been lit with what must be two hundred candles placed across every surface, warming the chandeliers into something amber and alive.
The floor is clear. At the far end, near the stage, a musician sits with the Stradivarius.
My throat tightens completely without my permission.
She lifts the bow and the violin does what this particular instrument always does, which is fill a room with something that cannot be explained by acoustics alone.
Nik is standing beside me, not steering me, not behind me making the moment about arrival.
Beside me. Watching my face the way he watches things he has decided matter.
"This is where we were standing," he says. "When you bid, like you were fighting for something you had been told you were not allowed to have."
His voice is in the register I know, the low certain one with nothing performed about it.
"I have been watching you do that for two years.
Claim things. Fight for things. You are the bravest person I know, and I am fully aware that is not a word you would choose for yourself, and I do not care.
" He reaches into his jacket. He opens a small box.
"I would like to spend the rest of my life telling you that, if you will allow it. "
The ring. An emerald, deep and precise, flanked by two diamonds. Not ostentatious and not modest. Simply extraordinary in the way things are when they have been chosen with total attention and zero compromise.
I look at it. Then at him.
"The emerald is unusual," I say.
"I thought you would appreciate not being predictable." The corner of his mouth lifts. "Also it matches nothing you own, which means you will need to buy new things."
"That is the most absurd justification for a gemstone selection I have ever heard from a grown adult, Nikolai."
"Natasha."
I stop. My hand goes to my sternum, the old habit, because something is happening in my chest that has too much going on to contain gracefully. The Stradivarius fills the room. The candles do not care what is happening beneath them.
"Yes," I say. Simply. Completely. The way I say things I mean with everything. "Yes, Kolya."
He slides the ring onto my finger. He holds my hand in both of his afterward and does not rush it, because he never rushes anything that actually matters, and I lean up and kiss him once and pull back and look at the emerald catching the candlelight and say: "I am going to need a very detailed binder. "
His laugh, real and low and entirely surprised out of him, fills the entire ballroom.
I text Victoria from the cab home. She responds in under two minutes: Finally. I have been sitting on this since August. When I write back asking how she knew, her answer arrives fast: He called me for your ring size, darling. Do not tell him I told you.
I look at this for a moment. Then I look at Nik in the seat beside me.
"Katya helped you pick the ring," I say.
"Katya made twelve suggestions over three phone calls.
" He looks out the window at Chicago going past. "I used none of them.
I went to Paris myself." He says it with the quiet, private pride of a man who went to Paris alone and chose something and got it exactly right.
"I also instructed Katya not to tell you I went to Paris. "
"She did not tell me," I say. "I deduced it."
He shakes his head at the window. "Of course you did," he says.
What surprises me is not that I want to get married.
What surprises me, four days after the proposal, when I open a blank document at six AM instead of the Q4 projections and begin building a venue research spreadsheet that develops ten columns before Victoria arrives for coffee, is that I am actually enjoying this.
Not executing it as a logistical obligation.
Not managing it from a safe professional distance.
Genuinely, straightforwardly enjoying it in a way that has nothing efficient about it.
Victoria looks at the screen. "You have a column for chandeliers."
"Chandeliers determine the ambient atmosphere of an event space."
"They are decorative fixtures."
"In a venue of this scale they are structurally atmospheric. There is a meaningful distinction." I do not look up from the laptop. "Stop making that face."
"I am sitting here completely neutrally." She pours herself coffee and settles her eight-months-pregnant self into the chair across from me with the serene authority of a woman who considers her current condition an all-access pass to whatever she wants, which is accurate and correct.
She looks at the screen again. "What colour scheme."
"Ivory and sage. Possibly a third accent depending on the final floral brief."
"You decided this in four days."
"I have been refining it for four days. The initial decision took thirty minutes."
Victoria sets her mug down and looks at me with the expression she saves for moments when something she predicted privately has come true so precisely that she is a little bit awed by her own accuracy.
"Tasha. You have always had that wifey vibe.
Do not look at me like that, I said what I said.
" She holds up both hands. "You are the destination.
You have always been the destination. It just took the right man long enough to figure out the map. "
"That is an extremely elaborate metaphor."
"I am eight months along, my second pregnancy.
I am allowed elaborate metaphors." She picks up her coffee.
"Villa d'Este," she says, reading the top of the spreadsheet, and then she is quiet for a full six seconds, and then her voice goes soft in the specific way it goes when something has gotten through the considerable composure she maintains in all professional and semi-professional contexts. "Lake Como in June."
"If you cry in this kitchen I am reconsidering everything."
"I am absolutely not crying." She is going to cry in thirty seconds. "Is there a tab for the wine list?"
"Two tabs for the wine list."
She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand twice and I squeeze back and we sit like that while Irina wages her daily war against the silicone mat in the other room and Nik retrieves the blueberries Irina has redistributed across the floor and Beethoven watches from the counter with the mild, impartial judgment he brings to all human activity.
"I need you at every single stage of this," I say. "Every tasting, every walkthrough, every time a florist uses the word whimsical."
Victoria straightens immediately. "I will personally remove from the premises anyone who uses the word whimsical in your presence. I am pregnant and intend to weaponize this freely."
She pulls the laptop toward her and looks at the seating chart and starts moving names around with the decisive efficiency of a woman who has been navigating complicated rooms her entire life.
"You are a nightmare to seat," she says, which is not about me at all and is about something else entirely and we both know it and say nothing.
She is, honestly, the best person I know.
Victoria Sterling-Thompson, CEO, producing her second child, wielding a seating chart like a personal weapon, wearing the navy dress she always wears when she wants to look like someone who runs a record label and is inexplicably good at everything, which she is.
My best friend. The woman who walked into my office two years ago and physically removed my laptop from my hands and told me I was becoming very expensive furniture.
She was not wrong about that either.
I look at the emerald on my finger. It catches the morning light. It matches nothing I own. I am already thinking about what I need to buy.