Chapter 9
He came to the gate at four o'clock in the afternoon, holding flowers.
Tanisha was upstairs when it happened, standing at the tall window of the master suite, she'd been sleeping there for three nights now, though neither of them had said a word about it out loud, and she saw the car roll slowly up to the iron gate at the foot of the long drive.
A gray sedan, dented at the rear quarter panel, the kind of car that didn't belong on a River Oaks street.
She knew the car. She'd ridden in that car. Her stomach turned to ice.
The driver's door opened and Dorian got out.
He looked good. That was the thing she could never explain to people who hadn't lived it, he always looked good.
Lean and easy on the eye, a guitar player's loose grace, dressed in a soft denim jacket, a bouquet of grocery-store sunflowers cradled in the crook of his arm like he was picking her up for a first date.
He smiled up at the house. He couldn't see her behind the glass, but she felt the smile land on her anyway.
Stanislav was already at the gate.
Tanisha had not even seen him move. One moment the drive was empty and the next the security director was simply there, all six and a half granite feet of him, planted between the gate and the man with the flowers like a wall that had decided to grow a face.
She couldn't hear the words. She didn't have to.
She watched Dorian hold up the flowers, watched him spread his hands, watched him do the thing he always did, the reasonable voice, the wounded eyes, the I just want to talk, man, I just want to talk this through.
She had seen that performance a hundred times.
It had worked on judges. It had worked on her own mother's old friends.
It had worked, for two long years, on her.
It did not work on Stanislav.
The former St. Petersburg detective said something short. Dorian's reasonable face flickered. He stepped closer to the gate. Stanislav did not move so much as an inch, and there was something in his absolute stillness that made Dorian stop.
And then Dorian's reasonable mask slipped, the way it always eventually did, and he turned his face up toward the house and started to shout.
"TANISHA!" His voice carried up the long drive, thin and ragged at the edges.
"I know you can hear me! You're making the biggest mistake of your life, you hear me?
That man doesn't know you! He bought you!
That's all this is, you're a thing he bought!
" The sunflowers shook in his fist. "You think he's gonna keep you?
You think a man like that keeps a woman like you?
You're gonna come crawling back and I'm gonna be RIGHT HERE,"
Stanislav took one step forward.
Just one.
Dorian got back in his car.
He sat there for a long moment, engine idling, staring up at the house through the gate. Then he threw the flowers out the window onto the road, and reversed so fast, and was gone.
Tanisha realized she was shaking. Her whole body. Her hands, her knees, her teeth. She pressed her palm flat against the cold window glass and tried to make it stop and couldn't.
That was how Yegor found her.
He came into the room fast, Stanislav must have called him, he was still loosening his tie, his suit jacket already gone, his face tight with something she didn't have the capacity to read right then. He took one look at her at the window, shaking, and he didn't ask a single question.
He crossed the room and wrapped her up in his arms.
He didn't say it's okay or he's gone. He didn't say any of the useless things people said.
He just held her, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other splayed warm and steady between her shoulder blades, and he held on while she shook against his chest, and slowly, slowly, the shaking stopped.
"I hate that he can do that," she whispered into his shirt. "I hate that he can drive up to a gate and make my whole body forget all this time has passed in four seconds."
"I know."
"You don't know."
"No," he agreed quietly. "I don't."
She loved him a little for that. She wasn't ready to think the word, but it moved through her anyway, quiet and undeniable, while he held her at the window.
*****
He told her that evening, in the study, in a voice she'd never heard him use.
It was lower than his boardroom voice and flatter than his bedroom voice, and there was something underneath it that made the hair on her arms stand up, not fear of him, never that, but a clear understanding that Yegor in this mood was a genuinely dangerous man, and that all of that danger was, for once, pointed away from her.
"The security team is doubled as of an hour ago," he said.
"Six men, rotating, around the clock. The gate is monitored on a live feed Stanislav watches personally.
I've hired a private investigator, the best in Texas, to build a file on Dorian: every address, every contact, every move he makes in this city.
If he so much as buys a coffee within a mile of you, I'll know about it before the cup is full.
" He looked at her. "Under no circumstances does that man get to you.
None. I want to be very clear about that.
There is no version of the next ninety days where he touches you again. "
Tanisha stared at him.
And something in her, the same something that had spent months learning that the only person who could keep her safe was herself, rose up and lashed out, because being kept was its own kind of cage and she had sworn she would never live in one again.
"Stop it," she said. "Just, stop."
He blinked. "Stop what?"
"This." She gestured at all of it, the doubled guards, the investigator, the dangerous flat voice.
"I didn't sign up for this, Yegor. I signed up to wear the dresses and charm your columnists and pretend to be in love with you for ninety days and then disappear with a check.
I didn't sign up for you to feel things about me.
" Her voice cracked, traitorous. "I didn't sign up for you to hire armies and look at me like that.
I signed up for ninety days. That's all. "
Yegor was quiet for a long moment.
"Funny," he said.
"What's funny?"
"Neither did I." He held her eyes. "I signed up for ninety days too, Tanisha.
I signed up for one immaculate dinner, a lawsuit dying of its own weight and a clean exit at day ninety.
I did not sign up to lie awake counting the days I have left with you instead of the days until I'm free of you.
I did not sign up for any of this. And yet here we both are. "
She had no answer for that.
She left the study without one.
*****
Galina took her shopping the next day, in the Galleria, ostensibly because Tanisha needed cold-weather clothes and refused to explain why Galina had decided this so urgently.
It was, Tanisha understood about an hour in, not really about the shopping.
Oh, there was shopping. Galina shopped with total conviction and zero patience for hesitation, sweeping through the boutiques and holding things up against Tanisha and pronouncing verdicts in two languages.
This, yes. This, never. Who designed this, a person who hates women?
She refused to let Tanisha look at a single price tag, "You will not insult me by knowing the cost of a gift, it is vulgar", and she had strong, specific, frequently hilarious opinions about color, declaring that Tanisha looked magnificent in deep jewel tones, emerald and that warm rust-red of the polo dress, and that whoever had once tried to put her in pale sage green should be reported to the authorities.
"That was Pascal," Tanisha admitted, laughing. "The stylist."
"Pascal is fired."
"He's very good at his job."
"He is fired in my heart, which is the only place that matters.
" Galina draped a deep wine-colored cashmere wrap over Tanisha's shoulders and stepped back to admire it, her sharp gray eyes softened.
"There. You see? You wear the colors of a woman who is not sorry to be looked at.
Good. A woman should never be sorry to be looked at. "
And somewhere in all of it, in the trying-on, the verdicts and the way Galina tucked Tanisha's arm into hers as they walked, the way she introduced her to a shopgirl as my daughter-in-law, is she not beautiful, Tanisha felt something she had not let herself feel since her own mother left when she was small.
She felt mothered. Claimed. Folded into a family without being asked to earn it first. It undid her a little, and she had to blink hard at a rack of scarves until it passed.
They were sitting in a quiet café afterward with their bags around their feet, Galina turning a tiny cup of espresso in her ringed fingers, when the older woman said:
"He has told you about Vasilisa, of course."
Tanisha looked up. "Who?"
Galina's silver eyebrows rose a fraction.
"No," she said softly. "Of course he has not. He tells no one anything. Stone, that boy. Pure stone." She set down the cup. "Vasilisa was his wife. His first wife. Before you."
Tanisha was taken aback.
"He was twenty-two," Galina said. "She was a model.
Russian, like us. Beautiful in the way that is a job, you understand, beauty that is a career, not a gift.
She married my Yegor when he had just made his first fortune, when he was a boy drowning in a billion dollars and a business too big for him, and she stood beside him in every photograph and smiled like a woman in love.
" Galina's mouth thinned. "Six months. Six months, and then she left him for an Italian.
A race-car driver. She took a settlement and a villa and his pride, and she gave an interview about it, she laughed about him in the interview.
She said he was cold. She said being married to him was like being married to a bank vault. "
"Galina,"
"He was not cold." Galina's eyes flashed.
"He was twenty-two and he did not know how to be a person and a billionaire at the same time, and the first woman he trusted with his money decided his money was the only thing about him worth having.
So he learned the lesson she taught him.
He decided that if a woman was going to want only the vault, he would simply be the vault.
He would never again hand anyone the soft boy from the photograph with the fish.
" She looked at Tanisha. "That was twelve years ago.
He has been a vault for twelve years. The arranged marriage, the Jasper girl, do you see?
He chose a contract on purpose. A woman he would never love, who would never be able to leave him in a way that hurt, because there was nothing real to leave.
It was safe. He has been performing safe for twelve years. "
Tanisha sat with that.
It rearranged everything. The flat boardroom voice.
The careful distance. The eleven meetings with Bettina and no kiss.
The way he'd asked permission to take her hand.
The way he'd said I don't sleep with women who are working for me like a man holding a door shut against his own heart.
He had not been performing emotional safety for ninety days.
He had been performing it for twelve years.
And somewhere in the last three weeks, he had stopped.
"Why are you telling me this?" Tanisha asked quietly.
Galina gathered her bags and stood, she smiled, and it was a small, knowing, deeply Russian smile that Tanisha was beginning to recognize as the most dangerous expression in the family.
"Because, kind eyes," Galina said, patting her cheek, "he has not looked at a woman the way he looks at you. Not once. I am his mother, and I am not going to stand quietly and watch him talk himself out of the only good thing that has happened to him since he was a boy who cried over a fish."
She walked off toward the parking garage, leaving Tanisha alone at the little café table, surrounded by shopping bags.