Extended Epilogue
Natasha
The water at Lake Como is the colour of something too beautiful to have a precise name for, and I have been awake since five AM composing candidates and have not settled on one.
Villa d'Este sits at the lake's edge with the kind of beauty that does not need to announce itself, four centuries of pale stone and cypress and tiered gardens descending from the main building down to the water's edge.
The formal gardens are in full June bloom, lemon trees and roses at their peak, white garden roses and trailing wisteria wound through the stone balustrades along the aisle in tall Venetian glass vases.
Hurricane lanterns run the full length of the aisle and across the terrace, not yet lit in the late afternoon light but waiting, patient, because the light is already extraordinary and in two hours it will be something else entirely.
The long tables are laid in ivory linen with candlelight in low glass holders and white peonies in arrangements that are exactly six centimetres higher than they would have been had I not revised the brief, and the revision was correct.
Rosa arrived two days before anyone else.
Nobody asked her to. She reviewed the catering menu, made three amendments the head chef accepted with the startled compliance of someone who recognises real expertise when it walks into their kitchen, and then produced a pan of black beans and rice for the wedding party and set it on the villa counter as though she had always cooked in this kitchen and planned to continue doing so indefinitely.
"Eat," she told me. "Before you forget."
I ate the whole pan. It helped enormously.
Victoria has been here for three days and is eight months pregnant and completely and spectacularly undeterred.
She has been beside me at every walkthrough, every confirmation call, every moment when the florist said something that made me want to revise the brief at the last minute.
She talked me out of both last-minute revisions.
She was right both times and I told her so, which cost me nothing because Victoria already knew.
"The peonies on the east side," I say on the terrace at ten AM.
"Are perfect," she says, looking at the lake and not at me.
"The arrangement is six centimetres lower than the brief specified."
"Tasha." She does not move her eyes from the water. "The peonies are perfect. The wisteria is perfect. The chairs are perfect. The weather, which exists entirely outside the jurisdiction of your binder, is also perfect." She takes a bite of her pastry. "Sit down."
I do as she says.
The guests begin arriving in the early afternoon, some by road through the main gates and some by boat across the water, because Villa d'Este receives people however the approach makes sense and nobody argues.
The Astrovskaya wealth is present in every detail of the occasion without making a speech about itself, which was the brief and has been executed exactly.
Brandy arrives with Sofia and walks straight to the terrace railing and stands there for a full minute with his hands in his pockets, not speaking, just looking at the mountains turning violet across the lake. Two Atlantic Records board members arrive together in an excellent car.
A former prime minister and his wife. Jax and Melody Kane with the twins release the energy of the journey by running the garden path at full speed the moment the car door opens.
Emma Kane is nine years old, nearly ten, and has treated her flower girl assignment with the seriousness it fully deserves.
She asked me three specific questions about optimal petal distribution and pacing and I gave her a detailed and honest answer and we understood each other completely and I trust her with this more than I trust most adults with most things.
Katya arrives in ivory, which she told absolutely no one about in advance, and against the late afternoon lake light with her hair loose she looks like herself, which is the best she ever looks. I watch her come through the garden gate and feel something warm and settled in my chest.
Rosa gets a chair near the garden early and sits in it with the authority of a woman who has been on her feet for two days and has earned every inch of her front-row position.
She has a handkerchief already in her hand.
She is not using it yet. She is holding it, ready, which is its own kind of confidence in what is about to happen.
At three o'clock Victoria finds me in the upstairs suite and looks at me for a moment without speaking.
My dress is ivory silk, structured and clean-lined, with a low open back that my mother would have loved.
My hair is up. The emerald and its flanking diamonds are on my right hand for the ceremony, switching left after.
The bouquet is white peonies and trailing greenery, exactly the brief, and it is exactly the right weight.
"Tasha," Victoria says. "You look like someone who is exactly where they are supposed to be."
She squeezes my hand twice and I squeeze back.
"Let's go," she says.
I am not nervous. I discover this precisely at the moment I begin walking and it is the single most surprising fact of the entire day. Not managed calm. Not performed composure. Actually, genuinely, not nervous. Something cleaner than that. Something I do not have a tab for.
The aisle is everything Emma promised. She has laid an exceptional petal trail, measured and even, and she is standing at the end of it with her hands folded and the expression of someone who has reviewed the finished product and approved it.
Rosa is in the front row with the handkerchief now pressed briefly to her eyes, and then she lifts her chin and smiles at me, and that smile does something to my chest that I am absolutely not addressing right now because I have an aisle to finish.
And at the altar, Nik.
He is in the dark Italian suit that was built for him and nobody else, the white rose at his lapel, no tie, because he never wears a tie and I stopped expecting it a year ago and have been privately grateful ever since.
He is looking at me the way he looks at me when nothing is managed or filed or kept at a safe operational distance. The full direct thing. In a room of three hundred people and he is not looking at any of them.
I keep walking.
Brandy stops holding it together somewhere around my fourth step. I hear Sofia hand him something. I keep walking.
I reach Nik.
He takes my hand. Warm. Not too tight. Just warm, the way it has always been.
"You are here," he says, just for me.
"I am here," I whisper.
We decided to write our own vows. He says: "I am not a man given to speeches and you know this better than anyone.
I will say only that you are the thing I did not know I was looking for, which is the only kind of finding that counts.
I will spend the rest of my life being worth the trust it took you to get here.
" I say: "I spent thirty-five years building a very organised life and calling it sufficient.
You are the reason I know the difference. Do not make me regret telling you that in front of witnesses."
Laughter moves through the terrace. His smile, low and sudden and entirely genuine, reaches the back row. The officiant, who understood the brief perfectly, keeps it brief.
The reception takes over as the sun drops behind the mountains and the lake shifts from blue to silver to something that cannot be accurately named. The candles come into their full power.
The tables glow. The string quartet gives way to a small band that knows exactly what they are doing and does it without drama.
People are talking over each other in four languages at full volume and nobody is going anywhere and the whole terrace smells of roses and lake air and whatever Rosa communicated to the catering team that has been making people close their eyes on the first bite all evening.
I find Rosa at her garden chair before the dancing begins and she cups my face in both hands and looks at me for a long moment and then she says: "You look like someone who finally came home, Mija."
I look at the lake. The mountains. Irina asleep in her crib across the terrace, dark hair pressed against the pillow, entirely and serenely unimpressed by the extraordinary occasion she is technically attending.
"Yes. I think I did."
We dance as the mountains go dark and the lake goes black and silver under the moon. Nik chose the music for the first dance and says nothing about his choice, just watches my face when it begins, and I catch the opening bars.
"Shostakovich," I say.
"Yes."
"You are still wrong about Shostakovich."
"We have discussed this at considerable length," he says, pulling me in slightly closer.
"We have. You remain incorrect." I put my hand at the back of his neck. "I have decided to be generous about it, given the occasion."
He says nothing, which is his highest form of concession, and we move through the music with the ease of two people who have been learning each other's language long enough that the translation now happens before the thought.
His hand is warm at my back. The cypress trees stand in their exact rows along the garden edge.
The lake holds the moonlight without any apparent effort.
I see Katya across the terrace accept a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and turn toward the garden and stop.
She is looking at someone I do not immediately place, a man standing near the stone balustrade with a glass he is not drinking from and an expression that says something has caught him completely off guard.
He is still and dark-eyed and looking at my sister-in-law in a way that tells me he was not expecting her and is now recalibrating the entire evening around that fact.
Katya does not look away from him.
I file this away. I say nothing to Nik about his sister's situation at his own wedding. Some information can wait.
"You are smiling," Nik says.