Chapter 6 #2
"I know that. I've always known that. I just never had the…"
"I know." He sat back. "I started at sixteen on a rig in the Permian Basin.
My father put me there on purpose. The other men thought I was a soft Russian boy in fancy boots, and they were right, and they made sure I knew it.
" A ghost of something crossed his face.
"I learned the entire business from the bottom of a derrick up, covered in mud, before I ever saw the inside of a boardroom.
My father believed you could not own a thing you didn't understand with your hands.
I used to hate him for it. Now it's the only part of me I trust."
"That's why you asked about the food cost," she said slowly. "Instead of just offering to pay for a building."
He looked at her.
"You don't want a man to buy you a building," he said. "You want a man to understand the building. Those are different things."
It was, almost word for word, the thing he'd said to her in the foyer about the dress, you should never wear anyone else's idea of you, and she realized, sitting in his terrifying lawyers' chair at one in the morning with hot honey on her fingers, that Yegor had been paying a great deal more attention to her than either of them had agreed to in the contract.
"Tell me about Seoul," he said. "The real version. Not the scholarship-and-came-home version. What was it actually like?"
So she told him. The tiny apartment in Mapo with the window that looked at a brick wall.
The first month when she understood almost nothing and cried in a convenience store because she couldn't read the labels and was too proud to ask.
The night-market stalls where she learned more about flavor than any classroom taught her, the old woman who ran a tteokbokki cart and let Tanisha watch her work for free for three weeks before she ever spoke a word, then started correcting her knife grip in sharp Korean and broken English.
The way the food had cracked something open in her, the realization that her grandmother's Southern cooking and that Seoul night market were having the same conversation in two different languages, all that fermentation and patience and love-as-labor, and that she could be the person who introduced them.
"That's Hot Honey," she said. "That's the whole thing. It's my grandmother's kitchen and that woman's cart, finally getting to talk to each other through me."
Yegor was quiet, watching her.
"My father would have understood you," he said finally.
"He didn't understand much about people.
But he understood building a thing with your hands, because no one will build it for you.
He came to Houston with forty thousand dollars and an accent everyone laughed at, and he died owning half the Permian Basin, and he never once let me forget what the first apartment looked like.
He'd have hated everything about how I met you.
The livestream, the scandal, all of it. And then he'd have eaten that sandwich and forgiven the whole thing, because he believed you could trust a person who could feed you and mean it. "
"You think I mean it?"
"I think," Yegor said slowly, "you made two sandwiches at midnight for a man you're not even sure you like, because the idea of someone in your house going hungry physically bothered you. Yes. I think you mean it."
Tanisha didn't have an answer for that, so she stole a pickle off his plate instead, and he let her. Something was changing between them but neither of them said so.
For the first time, they weren't a billionaire and his fake wife. They weren't a contract or a problem to fix. They were just two people, each built by hard work and a parent who refused to let them be small, talking in a quiet house at one in the morning as if the rest of the world had gone away.
*****
Neither of them noticed Galina in the doorway.
She had come down for her chamomile tea, padding silently through the dark house in her dressing gown, and she had stopped at the study door at the sound of her son's voice, her son, who did not talk, who had not talked, really talked, since the rigs took the boy out of him, going on and on about food costs and derricks and second locations, leaning toward a woman with hot honey on her hands like she was the only warm thing in a cold country.
Galina did not go in.
She stood in the dark hallway with her empty teacup, and she watched her stone son become a person again, and a slow, deep, satisfied smile spread across her face.
"Hm," she whispered, the same sound from the breakfast table, she turned and went quietly back upstairs without her tea, because some things were better than chamomile.
*****
It was past one when Yegor's phone buzzed against the desk.
He glanced at it out of habit, and Tanisha watched the warmth drain out of his face and the boardroom click back into place, fast and total, like a door slamming.
"What," she said. "What is it?"
He turned the phone so she could see it.
A text. From a contact saved as Jasper, W.
We need to talk. Bring your wife.
The word wife sat there on the screen, weaponized, italicized by nothing but the man who'd typed it, and the warm small world they'd built in the study for two hours folded up and disappeared as if it had never been there at all.
"He doesn't text," Yegor said, very quietly. "Wendell Jasper does not text. He has people who text. If he's texting me himself, at one in the morning, then he's planning something, and he wants me to know it's personal."
Tanisha looked at the half-eaten sandwich, at the legal pad covered in her own handwriting, at the man across the desk whose face had just turned back to winter.
"Bring your wife," she read aloud.
"I'm not taking you anywhere near him."
"Yes, you are." She stood, gathered the plates, and lifted her chin.
"I told you in Vegas. I'm the best wife three million TikToks ever saw.
Whatever that man is planning, he's planning it to rattle you and break me.
So we're going to walk in there together, and we're going to be so happy and so in love it makes him sick.
" She paused at the door. "Besides. I cook for difficult men for a living. I've never met one I couldn't handle."
She left to clean Ferdinand's kitchen until it looked as if she'd never been there.
Behind her, Yegor sat alone, unwelcome realization that somewhere in the last two hours, the ninety days had stopped feeling like a sentence and started feeling like the only good thing that had happened to him in years.
He did not know what to do with that.
He poured the warm vodka down the sink and went to bed and, for the first time all week, did not dream about the cage.