Chapter 4
The Tarasoff mansion in River Oaks was twenty thousand square feet of pale limestone and old oak trees, and Tanisha stood in the marble foyer the next morning feeling exactly like what she was: a food-truck cook who had wandered into a museum and could not find the exit.
There were two staff wings, a library with a ladder on a brass rail, six-car garage, and in the six-car garage there was a low, vicious-looking Bugatti the color of a storm cloud that she had been told, by the soft-spoken estate manager, was worth more than three million dollars, and which she immediately decided she would never go within ten feet of for fear of breathing on it wrong.
"You can drive any of them," the estate manager had said, gesturing at the row of cars.
"I'll walk," Tanisha had said.
Her suite alone was bigger than her entire food truck and the cramped apartment where she'd been living.
Bigger, possibly, than Mama Boone's whole house.
She had stood in the middle of it the night before, in the dark, and felt smaller than she had felt in eighteen months, which was saying something.
The cover story had been agreed upon and rehearsed.
Love at first sight in Vegas. A wild, romantic, impulsive decision that neither of them regretted.
They had practiced it twice with Coralie until it stopped sounding like a hostage statement.
Tanisha was a good liar when she had to be.
Yegor, she was learning, was a magnificent one, which she noted as both useful and faintly alarming.
What had not been on the schedule was Galina.
*****
Yegor's mother arrived from St. Petersburg two days later, unannounced, with four suitcases and an energy that walked into the house several seconds before she did.
She was sixty-eight years old and she moved like a woman who had decided long ago that age was nothing but an irrelevant number.
Her silver hair was swept up and pinned with something that caught the light.
Her coat was the deep red of good wine. She was small, straight-backed and regal.
She had been a widow for three years and a single woman, by all accounts, ever since, with no interest whatsoever in changing that.
She came through the front door, took one look at Tanisha standing nervously at the foot of the grand staircase, and stopped dead.
For one terrible second, nobody moved.
Then Galina crossed the foyer, took Tanisha's face gently in both of her cool, ringed hands, and looked at her with pale gray eyes that were so exactly Yegor's that Tanisha's heart felt a little flutter.
"You have kind eyes," Galina said, in heavily accented English, each word placed with care. "My son does not deserve kind eyes."
Tanisha was stunned into silence.
Behind his mother, Yegor closed his own eyes briefly, like a man bracing for a blow he had known was coming.
"Mama," he said.
"Hush." Galina did not let go of Tanisha's face.
She studied her for another long moment, and then she smiled, and the smile changed her whole face into something warm and mischievous.
"You are even more beautiful in person than on the telephone screen.
The braids, so elegant. You did not let those television people make you up like a clown.
Good. Good girl. Vegas." She tutted. "My son marries a beautiful, sensible woman in Las Vegas, like an American, and tells his mother nothing.
Nothing! I had to find out from a video. A video, Yegorushka."
"Mama, I was going to call,"
"You were going to call." Galina finally released Tanisha and rounded on her son.
"After three million strangers. After the daughter of that horrible Jasper man.
After the lawyer. Your mother is item number four hundred on the list, this is what I learn.
" She reached into her enormous handbag.
"Well. While I am four hundredth, I will make myself useful. "
She pulled out a photograph.
Tanisha would treasure this moment for the rest of her life.
It was a small, slightly creased color photo of a boy of about ten, gap-toothed, sunburned, grinning ear to ear, holding up a fish nearly as long as his own torso.
His hair was a dark brown mess, his ears stuck out and he was wearing a yellow rain slicker three sizes too big and an expression of such pure, uncomplicated joy that it took Tanisha a full three seconds to connect him to the granite-faced billionaire standing four feet away.
"This is Yegor," Galina said proudly. "Before he became boring."
"Mama. Please."
"He cried when we made him put the fish back. Big tears. Here." Galina pointed at the photo. "You can see, he is about to cry. He named the fish. He named all the fish. He wanted to keep them in the bathtub."
"I was nine," Yegor said to the ceiling.
"You were ten. It was your birthday. You wore that coat for two more years because you loved it, even when the sleeves came to here." Galina mimed a point halfway up her forearm and beamed at Tanisha. "He was a soft boy. The softest boy. Then his father took him to the oil and turned him to stone."
Yegor looked, in that moment, like a man earnestly considering whether the marble floor might open up and swallow him.
Tanisha took the photograph in both hands and looked at it for a long time. The gap-toothed boy in the too-big yellow coat. The joy. The fish he had wanted to name and keep.
"Thank you," she said quietly, and meant it. "He's adorable."
"He was," Galina agreed. "Now he is rich.
" She said the word rich the way other women said unfortunate.
"A billionaire, they tell me. As if money is a personality.
Come, kind eyes. You will show me this enormous cold house, and you will tell me your real story, because I do not believe one word of the love-at-first-sight, I have buried a husband and I know a business arrangement when it walks past me, but I have decided I do not care, because you have kind eyes and my son cannot stop looking at you. "
"I'm not looking," Yegor started.
"You are," said his mother, and swept off toward the kitchen with Tanisha's arm in hers, leaving her son standing alone in his own enormous foyer, holding a creased photograph of himself at ten years old, looking very much like a man who had lost control of his own house.
*****
Galina did not, it turned out, want a tour of the cold house.
She wanted coffee, to sit down, and she wanted to look at Tanisha.
She stationed the two of them in a small sunroom off the kitchen that Tanisha hadn't even known existed, and she made the coffee herself, refusing all help from the hovering staff, in a battered little pot she'd produced from one of her four suitcases, because, she explained, American hotels and even American billionaires did not know the first thing about making proper coffee.
"Now," Galina said, settling into a chair with her cup.
"The truth. Not the love-at-first-sight.
I told you I do not believe it, and I told you I do not care, and both of these things are true.
But I am sixty-eight years old, and I have buried a husband, and I would like to know what kind of woman my son has gotten himself entangled with, whatever the entanglement is. "
So Tanisha told her a version of the truth.
Not the contract, that part stayed locked, but the true parts around it.
Nashville. The food truck. Her grandmother.
Seoul. The dream of a real restaurant. She found, to her own surprise, that she wanted to tell this sharp-eyed Russian woman the truth, or as much of it as she safely could.
Galina listened.
"A cook," Galina said finally, with deep approval.
"Good. Good. A woman who feeds people is a woman who knows something about love, whatever she calls it.
My own mother fed half of Leningrad through the bad years, do you know this?
People came to her door and she had nothing, nothing, and somehow there was always soup.
Somehow there was always bread." She tapped the rim of her cup.
"Yegor's father did not understand this.
He thought love was a thing you built, like a company.
Steel and contracts. He gave my son everything except the knowledge that a person can simply be wanted.
" Her eyes found Tanisha's, suddenly very direct.
"Can you give him that, kind eyes? Not the company.
Not the dinners for the newspapers. The other thing. The thing he does not believe in."
Tanisha opened her mouth, and found she had no safe answer.
"Hm," said Galina, satisfied, as if the lack of an answer was an answer all of its own. "We will see."
*****
The argument came that night, in the kitchen, after Galina had been ensconced in the largest guest suite and had finally, blessedly, gone to sleep.
"We need ground rules," Yegor said.
He had taken off his jacket, a soft gray cashmere thing tonight, the color of pewter, and rolled his sleeves to the elbow.
There was a glass of something amber in his hand.
He stood on one side of the enormous kitchen island, and Tanisha stood on the other, and the island between them felt, somehow, both like a fortress and not nearly wide enough.
"Agreed," she said. "Separate bedrooms. Obviously."
"Obviously."
"No nicknames in front of the staff. I'm not your 'darling' or your 'baby' or whatever billionaires call the women they buy."
"I have never in my life called a woman 'baby,'" Yegor said, with such genuine offense that she almost laughed.
"No touching unless the cameras are out. Photographers, press, society people, fine, we put on a show. Inside this house, when it's just us and the staff, you keep your hands to yourself and I'll keep mine to myself, and we get through ninety days like two professionals."
"Done." He took a sip of his drink. "One addition. My security director, Stanislav, you met him, sweeps your phone once a week."