Chapter 5
The dress was green, and Tanisha hated it the moment she saw it laid out on the bed.
It wasn't the color, exactly. It was the message of the color.
The stylist, a brisk young man named Pascal who had arrived that morning with three rolling racks and the bearing of a general, had chosen a soft sage-green sundress with a demure neckline and a hem that hovered politely below the knee.
It was the dress of a woman who wanted to be liked, of a woman apologizing for existing.
It was the dress of a woman who had married a billionaire by accident and was very sorry about it and would not be any trouble at all.
Tanisha picked it up off the bed, held it against herself in the mirror, and felt eighteen months of being small rise up in her throat like heat.
She had spent so long making herself invisible because a man had taught her that being seen was dangerous.
She had earned every inch of that fear. But she was so tired of it.
She was so tired of shrinking. And if she was going to walk into a Houston charity polo match on the arm of Yegor Tarasoff in front of every long lens in Texas, she was not going to do it in a dress that said please don't look at me.
She put the green dress back on the bed.
Then she went to the closet, her closet now, half-empty, holding the few good things she actually owned, and pulled out the one dress she'd packed from Nashville for no reason she could have named at the time.
A column dress in deep terracotta, the warm rust-red of Tennessee clay at sunset.
It hugged her shoulders and skimmed her hips and stopped at the ankle, and it glowed against her warm brown skin like it had been dyed to match her.
She put it on.
She redid her cornrows herself, gathering the long braids high into a sleek crown that left her neck bare. She put in the gold hoops and she looked at herself in the mirror, really looked, for the first time in a long time.
There she was.
There she finally was.
She walked downstairs twenty minutes late.
*****
Yegor was waiting in the foyer, checking his watch, dressed in a beautifully cut linen suit the color of bone, no tie, collar open at the throat against the Houston heat. Stanislav stood by the door like a statue someone had forgotten to dismiss.
"We're late," Yegor said, not looking up. "Pascal said the green…"
He looked up.
He stopped talking.
Tanisha had the deep, private satisfaction of watching a man with a billion dollars and a face like winter, completely lose his train of though.
His gaze traveled from the terracotta hem to the gold hoops and back, and something moved across his face that he did not bother to hide and could not have hidden if he'd tried.
"You're not wearing the green," he said.
"No."
"Pascal will have a stroke."
"Pascal can have whatever he wants. I'm wearing this."
Yegor looked at her for one more second, and then he did the thing she was beginning to understand he did when he had a feeling too large to manage, which was to say something flat and quiet that contained roughly ten times more than the words themselves.
"Good," he said. "You should never wear anyone else's idea of you."
"Don't get sweet on me, Tarasoff," she said, walking past him to the door. "We've got a show to put on."
"Tanisha."
She turned.
"When we get out of the car," he said, "I'm going to take your hand. There will be photographers. I should have asked you first, in the kitchen, when we made the rules. So I'm asking you now. Can I take your hand?"
She looked at him.
She thought about the last man who had taken her hand, and what his hands had eventually done.
And she thought about how this man, who could have simply grabbed her wrist on the way out of the car and called it a performance, had stopped, in his own foyer, with his security director watching, to ask.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "You can take my hand."
*****
Memorial Park on the day of the Houston Heart Foundation charity match was a sea of pastel linen, enormous hats, white tents, and people who had never in their lives worried about money, pretending, very hard, to be casual about it.
The polo ponies thundered down a green field that had been watered into impossible emerald against a hard, bright Texas sky.
Champagne moved on silver trays. And the moment Yegor stepped out of a black car with a beautiful Black woman in terracotta on his arm, the entire event turned, like a field of sunflowers, toward the heat.
The cameras went insane.
Tanisha had braced for it, but bracing was not the same as surviving it. The long lenses. The flashes even in daylight. The murmur that ran through the crowd, that's her, that's the one, the Vegas wife, the food-truck girl. She felt the old fear claw up the back of her neck.
And then Yegor's hand closed around hers.
It was warm, dry and very steady, and he laced his fingers through hers without looking at her. Then he leaned down just slightly and said, under the noise, only to her:
"I've got you. Eyes on me. Not them. Just walk."
She walked.
She looked at him, and not at them, and they crossed the lawn together as the cameras devoured them, and by the time they reached the foundation's tent, three different society columnists had already typed the words radiant and clearly smitten into their phones, and the lie was working better than either of them had expected.
*****
Inside the tent, the performance got harder, because the cameras were one thing but the people were another.
Houston society came at her in waves, women with surgically bright smiles and handshakes like wet paper, men who held her hand a beat too long and asked, with terrible casualness, what "her people did.
" Tanisha had spent two years being underestimated by oil money wives before she ever met one, and she handled them the way she handled a Friday lunch rush: smiling, moving, never letting any single one of them pin her down long enough to do damage.
A woman in an enormous coral hat told her she "simply must" share where she'd gotten "such striking braids," and Tanisha said, sweetly, that her cousin in Nashville did them and was completely booked up.
A man who introduced himself as something to do with petrochemicals asked whether she and Yegor had a prenup, and Tanisha laughed like it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard and watched him decide not to push.
Through all of it, Yegor stayed at her elbow, one hand resting light at the small of her back, fielding the questions she lobbed to him and lobbing back the ones meant to trip her, the two of them moving through the crowd like a rehearsed dance.
"You're good at this," he murmured, between conversations, real surprise in it.
"I run a business out of a metal box on a curb," she murmured back, still smiling at the room. "You think these people scare me? Try telling a drunk frat boy at midnight he's had enough. These folks are easy. They're just rude with better shoes."
He laughed, quick and quiet, a real one and a nearby columnist nearly dropped her phone trying to capture it.
That was when Tanisha saw Bettina Jasper across the tent.
She knew it was Bettina before anyone told her, because the young woman was standing beside a thick-necked, silver-haired man in a cream Stetson who could only be Wendell Jasper, and because Bettina was looking at Yegor with an expression Tanisha had not expected to see.
She'd expected heartbreak, fury or the cold, polished hatred of a woman who'd been publicly jilted.
What she saw instead was relief.
Bettina was perhaps twenty-five, pale and slim and pretty in the careful, blonde, finishing-school way of girls raised to marry well, and she was looking at the man who had abandoned her engagement in a drunken Vegas livestream.
Wendell, by contrast, looked at Yegor like he wanted to have him shot.
"That's Wendell," Yegor murmured. "And Bettina. Smile. Don't engage him. He wants you to engage."
"I know what he wants," Tanisha said, smiling beautifully at the man who was trying to sue her husband into the ground. "I cook for a living. I know exactly how to handle a man who thinks he's the most important thing in the room."
Yegor made a sound that was almost a laugh.
*****
Bettina cornered her in the ladies' room twenty minutes later.
It was a powder room the size of an apartment, all marble, gold fixtures and flattering light, and Tanisha was washing her hands when Bettina came in, checked the stalls were empty, and turned to face her.
"I'm not going to make a scene," Bettina said quickly. "I just, I needed to say something to you and I'm never going to get another chance, my father watches me like a hawk."
Tanisha turned off the water slowly. "Okay."
"He's not a bad man." Bettina's voice wavered and steadied.
"Yegor. I know everyone's saying he is. My father's telling every reporter in Texas that he's some, some reckless foreign liar.
He's not. He's the most honorable man I've ever met.
He just," She swallowed. "He doesn't love me.
He was never going to love me. We met eleven times in three years and he was perfectly kind and perfectly distant every single time, and I used to lie awake dreading the wedding, dreading the whole rest of my life with a kind man who'd never once looked at me the way… "
She stopped.
"The way he looked at you walking across that lawn just now," she said.
"You did me a favor. I needed you to know that.
Whatever happened in Vegas, however it happened, you walked into the worst week of my father's life and the best week of mine.
You did me a favor, and I'm grateful, and I'm sorry for whatever my father does to you both, because he is going to do something, he always does. "
And then she was gone, in a swirl of pale silk, before Tanisha could say a single word.
Tanisha stood alone in the marble powder room, her own reflection looking back at her, and felt the careful architecture of the lie wobble for the first time.
Because somewhere in the last ten minutes, the man she was pretending to love and the man who asked permission to hold her hand were dangerously starting to become the same person.
*****
"What did she say to you?"
They were in the back of the town car, gliding away from Memorial Park through the deepening Houston dusk. Yegor bone-colored jacket was still buttoned and there was a tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there at the match.
"Who?"
"Bettina. I saw her follow you to the powder room. She looked like she was working up to something. What did she say?"
Tanisha looked out of the window and decided, in a half-second she'd think about for a long time afterward, to give him only part of it.
"She said you're not as terrible as everyone thinks."
Yegor went quiet.
The car hummed. The city slid by gold and green.
"She was wrong," he said finally, and turned his face to the window. The flatness in his voice was the loudest thing Tanisha had heard all day.
She studied the hard line of his profile. The bruise on his jaw had faded to a yellow-green. He looked, in the low light, like a man who had spent so long being told he was cold that he had simply agreed.
She didn't think about what she did next. That was the dangerous part. She didn't decide it.
She reached over and plucked a stray petal off his lapel, a tiny crushed bloom of bougainvillea that had drifted onto him somewhere on that emerald lawn, magenta against the bone linen, and her fingers brushed the fabric over his chest as she did it.
He turned from the window.
Their eyes met properly, for the first time all day, in the dim hush of the car.
Neither of them moved.
His gaze dropped, just once, to her mouth, and came back up, and she felt the whole long day fold down into the six inches of warm air between them.
Her own heart was loud in her ears. She could have leaned in.
He could have leaned in. The petal sat crushed and forgotten between her thumb and forefinger.
The lie and truth hung in perfect, terrible balance, and for one suspended second the ninety days didn't exist, the contract didn't exist, there was only a man and a woman in the back of a car who had spent all afternoon pretending to feel something and had, somewhere along the way, stopped pretending.
Stanislav rapped his knuckles twice against the partition.
"Mr. Tarasoff. Photographers behind us. Three cars."
The spell broke like glass.
Yegor sat back. Tanisha turned to her window. The petal dropped from her fingers to the floor of the car, and neither of them picked it up, neither of them said one word for the rest of the drive home.
*****
Traffic had thickened to a crawl as they came down out of the hills, and one of the photographers had used it.
While the rest sat trapped in the pack three cars back, he'd filtered his motorbike up the stalled outside lane and simply idled there, level with the town car's rear window, shooting through the side glass for the better part of a minute while the two people behind it forgot the world existed.
A long lens, a clean profile line, a burst of forty frames, and a very good morning ahead of him.
The frame he chose — the woman in terracotta reaching toward the billionaire's chest, the man turned fully toward her, their faces close, the unmistakable charge of two people on the edge of a kiss — ran on the front page of Houston Society Weekly by morning, under a headline that read VEGAS LOVE STORY: THE REAL THING?
Galina cut it out at breakfast, smoothed it flat with both hands, and looked at it for a long time with a small, satisfied, deep Russian smile.
"Hm," she said to herself, and tucked it into her handbag.