Chapter 4 #2
Tanisha set down the glass of water she'd been holding.
"Excuse me?"
"It's not about trust. It's about Dorian Quincy.
" His voice was even, but his eyes were not.
"If that man is contacting you, I want a record of it.
I want to know what he says, when he says it, how he's tracking you.
I want to be three steps ahead of him, not three steps behind.
The most dangerous thing in the world right now is what neither of us knows about; what he's planning.
So Stanislav sweeps your phone, weekly, and you let him. "
Tanisha folded her arms. She knew, somewhere underneath the flare of anger, that he was right.
She also knew, much more loudly, that she had spent two years with a man who had monitored her phone, and that the words let him sweep your phone landed in her body like a slap whether Yegor meant them that way or not.
"The last man who wanted to look through my phone every week broke my ribs," she said.
Yegor paused, digesting this new information.
To his credit, and she would grant him this, later, when she was sorting the man into the part of her heart marked safe, he did not get defensive.
He did not explain himself, he did not tell her it was different.
He simply set down his glass, and met her eyes across the island, and let the silence hold the weight of what she'd said.
"You're right," he said finally. "That was the wrong way to ask."
"It wasn't a way to ask. It was a way to tell."
"Then I'm asking. Will you let Stanislav look at your phone once a week, not your messages with your grandmother, not your business, your friends, only anything from him, from an unknown number, anything that could be him.
You can sit in the room, watch every second.
You can take the phone back the moment it's done. "
Tanisha studied him.
"You're not going to read my texts to Renata?"
"I don't care about your texts to Renata. I care about the man who wants to hurt you. Those are very different things, and I'd like you to learn the difference between me and him sooner rather than later, because I find I do not enjoy being compared to him."
There it was again. That cold thing under the surface.
"Fine," she said. "He can look. For Dorian. Only Dorian."
"Thank you."
"And in exchange." She leaned both hands on the island. "You can sweep my phone the day you learn my grandmother's pound cake recipe by heart."
Yegor blinked.
"That's not…"
"Cup and a half of butter, three cups of sugar, six eggs, one at a time, three cups of cake flour, a cup of whole milk, a tablespoon of vanilla, a quarter teaspoon of salt, into a cold oven at three twenty-five for eighty minutes.
You let me trust your security man with my safety, you can at least carry one thing of mine in your head the way you carry your stock prices. " She raised an eyebrow. "Deal?"
A thing happened to Yegor face that had not happened to it in a long time, and that his sister, mother and his board would all have paid money to witness.
He almost smiled.
Almost.
"Cold oven?" he said.
"Cold oven. You put it in cold and bring it up with the cake. My grandmother would rather die than preheat for a pound cake."
"That's insane."
"It's perfect. There's a difference." She borrowed his lawyer's line on purpose, and saw him catch it, and also saw the almost-smile come back. "And you pay me for the difference."
For a moment, just a moment, the fortress of the island between them seemed to shrink to the width of a held breath.
Then Tanisha straightened, picked up her water, said goodnight, and walked out of the kitchen before either of them could decide what to do with the smaller distance.
*****
That night, alone in a guest suite the size of her entire former life, Tanisha lay in a bed with sheets so fine they felt like water, and stared at a ceiling she could barely see in the dark, and thought about a gap-toothed boy in a too-big yellow coat who had wanted to keep all the fish.
She had called home that evening, finally. She'd put it off for days, and then put it off some more, and when she couldn't stand the avoiding anymore she'd dialled them both at once, Mama Boone and Renata on the same line.
"There she is," Mama Boone said, warm as a kitchen. "Married, on the television, and her own grandmother finds out from a girl at church."
"I'm sorry, Mama."
"Mm." A world of opinion in one syllable.
Renata was less gentle. "A billionaire, Tanisha. From Vegas. You want to tell me what is actually going on, because you do not do impulsive, you do not do reckless, you plan your grocery list like it's a wedding."
And there it was, the moment she'd dreaded, the two people who knew her best holding the phone and waiting for the truth.
She could not give it to them. Not the contract, not Dorian, not the plan to vanish, because anything she told them was a thread someone could pull, and she would rather they be angry than be in danger.
So she gave them the version she'd built with Yegor instead, the whirlwind, the connection, the impulsive once-in-a-lifetime thing, and she hated every word of it, because she had never lied to these two women in her life.
"He treats me well," she said, and that part, at least, was true, and saying one true thing in the middle of all the false ones.
There was a silence. Then Mama Boone, quieter now, said, "You'd tell me if you were in trouble. Wouldn't you, baby?"
It was not really a question, and Tanisha closed her eyes. "I'm okay, Mama. I promise I'm okay."
"All right," her grandmother said, in a voice that did not believe her and loved her too much to push. "All right."
When she hung up she sat with the phone in her lap for a long time, missing them so hard it was a physical ache.
She had almost fallen asleep when her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
She told herself it was Renata or Mama Boone. She told herself a dozen kind things in the half-second before she rolled over and looked at the screen.
Unknown number.
Houston is a small town for someone like you.
The cold went all the way through her this time, down to the bone, and she lay rigid in a billionaire's house and understood, with total clarity, that not one inch of any of it would matter if Dorian decided to walk up the driveway.
She could not sleep.
She lay awake and watched the door.