Chapter 10
The board crisis came three days later, and it was real, which almost surprised Tanisha after weeks of manufactured drama.
A pipeline deal in the Leningrad Oblast had gone sideways, two of the Russian directors were threatening to walk, and Yegor needed to be in St. Petersburg within forty-eight hours or risk losing a partnership his father had built.
He told her this over breakfast, clipped and businesslike, .
..and then, after a deliberate pause, he added:
"Come with me."
Tanisha looked up from her coffee.
"To Russia."
"To Russia. A week. Maybe less." He turned his own cup in his hands, and for the first time she watched the great Yegor Tarasoff fumble for words.
"It would help the story — the press here will love it, billionaire whisks new wife to his homeland, et cetera.
And—" he stopped. Started again, more honestly.
"And Dorian cannot follow you to Russia.
There is an ocean and my entire security apparatus and a country that does not let strange American men near a Tarasoff.
You would be, for one week, completely safe.
Truly safe. I thought you might like to remember what that feels like.
"She should have said no. She knew she should have said no. Every rule they'd written said no.
"Yes," she said.
She told herself it was to escape Dorian. That was half of it. The other was sitting right there across the breakfast table from her, turning a coffee cup in his hands and trying not to look too pleased.
*****
They flew private, of course, fourteen hours and a different world at the end of it.
St. Petersburg in late autumn was a held breath.
Low slate skies pressed down over the city.
The golden domes of the cathedrals burned against the gray like struck matches.
The Neva ran wide and slow through the heart of it all, the color of pewter, the first thin skin of ice forming at its edges.
It was beautiful, a hard northern beauty, and Tanisha pressed her face to the car window like a child the whole drive in from the airport.
The Tarasoff family dacha sat an hour outside the city, down a birch-lined road, a sprawling old timber house with carved eaves, a steep snow-shedding roof and woodsmoke already curling from the chimney when they arrived.
It was nothing like the cold limestone palace in Houston.
It was warm, lived-in and a little shabby, and Tanisha loved it on sight.
She had never come close to loving the mansion like this.
But it was Yegor she couldn't stop watching.
Because Yegor changed in Russia.
*****
He showed her everything, over the next two days, with a quiet eagerness she had never seen in him.
He took her to the frozen edge of a lake near the dacha and told her, almost shyly, that this was where his father had taught him to ice-skate, holding him up by the back of his coat until he stopped falling.
He took her into the city, to a tiny old bakery with steamed-up windows where the woman behind the counter shrieked with joy at the sight of him and pressed warm poppyseed rolls into their hands and refused his money.
His babushka used to bring him here, he explained, his ears going faintly pink, every Sunday after church, for seventy years that woman's family has made these.
He spoke Russian everywhere they went, and it was a different man who spoke it, looser, warmer, younger.
In a café near the Fontanka, three old men playing chess looked up, recognized him, and burst into delighted shouts of "Yegorushka!
" They clapped him on the back and pinched his cheeks like he was still a boy, and he let them, laughing, a real laugh, his whole face open in a way she had never once seen in Houston.
He took her, on the second evening, to the cemetery where his father was buried.
It was a quiet place at the edge of the city, the old stones leaning under a blanket of fresh snow, the light already going violet by four in the afternoon.
He'd brought flowers, white ones, which he laid against the base of the headstone with a care that surprised her, and he brushed the snow off the small oval photograph with his bare hand even though the cold must have bitten.
He didn't say much there. He stood in the cold by the headstone with its Cyrillic letters and its small oval photograph of a hard-faced man with Yegor's exact gray eyes, and he was quiet for a long time. Tanisha held his gloved hand and didn't fill the silence.
"He was hard," Yegor said finally, his breath clouding. "Harder than I am. He made me into this." A pause. "I spent years angry at him for it. Standing here, I miss him so much I can't breathe. Both things are true. I never know what to do with that."
"You don't have to do anything with it," Tanisha said softly. "Some things you just carry and cannot be made sense of."
He was quiet for a moment, the snow gathering on the dark wool of his shoulders.
"He never said he loved me," Yegor said.
"Not once. I knew he did, but he never said the word.
He showed me instead. He showed me by putting me on that rig at sixteen, by teaching me everything he knew, by trusting me with the only thing he'd ever built.
I used to think that was enough. Showing instead of saying.
I built my whole life on the idea that it was enough.
" He looked at the headstone. "Lately I'm not sure it is. "
He was quiet for a moment. "Vasilisa used to stand exactly here and check her reflection in the marble. I brought her once, the first winter. She was bored by four o'clock." He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "I never brought anyone again. I told myself it was the cold."
Tanisha understood, then, that he was not really talking about his father anymore.
"Your first wife," she said quietly. Not a question. Galina had told her, in the café, the whole sad shape of it.
He didn't seem surprised she knew. "My mother has never been able to keep a secret.
" Snow gathered on his shoulders. "Six months, and she left me for someone louder.
It stung more than I ever admitted, if you want the truth, being thrown over that fast, being laughed at in an interview she gave afterward.
But that is not the part that shaped me.
" He looked at the headstone. "What shaped me is that I believed her.
She told the world I was a cold man, a vault, and instead of proving her wrong I spent twelve years proving her right.
I decided the safest thing was to be exactly what she accused me of being.
It is a stupid thing to build a life on.
I am only seeing that now, standing here, too late to get the years back. "
He went quiet, as though startled by himself. "I have not said any of that out loud. To anyone."
"Why me?" she asked.
"Because you are leaving," he said simply. "It is easy to hand something fragile to a person who will not be here to drop it." A pause. "Or that is what I told myself. I am no longer certain it is true."
She didn't have an answer for that. She just squeezed his gloved hand and let the snow fall around them, two people in a foreign graveyard at the blue end of the day, and she thought: there it is.
There's the whole man, right there. A boy who was loved in a language he was never allowed to hear out loud, trying to learn now.
He looked at her then, in the gray cemetery light, snow drifting down between them, and the look on his face was so naked that she had to glance away from it.
*****
Pavel Strigov hosted them for dinner on the third night.
He was Yegor's oldest friend, they'd met at six years old, throwing rocks at the same frozen pond, and he was a concert violinist of some renown.
A slim, elegant, expressive man who filled his apartment with candlelight, music and warmth and who embraced Yegor at the door for a full thirty seconds while Yegor stood there and let himself be embraced.
Pavel's husband, Tomás, was a Brazilian contemporary dancer with a wicked laugh and a way of making everyone in the room feel like the most fascinating person he'd ever met.
The four of them ate borscht, black bread and drank too much wine and laughed until Tanisha's face hurt.
Tomás told a story about how he and Pavel had met, a disastrous arts gala in Lisbon where Tomás had been hired to dance and Pavel to play, and Pavel had broken a string mid-performance and improvised so badly that Tomás had nearly fallen off the stage laughing, and they had argued about whose fault the ruined evening was for three hours afterward over bad Portuguese wine and never really stopped arguing or talking since.
"Eleven years," Tomás said, holding up his glass, his accent rolling warm over the words.
"Eleven years of him breaking strings and me catching them.
This is marriage. Everything else is decoration. "
Pavel told Tanisha, in turn, about his orchestra, about a young cellist he'd taken under his wing, a shy girl from the provinces with more talent than confidence, and how teaching her had become the great unexpected joy of his middle age.
He talked about it with such tenderness that Tanisha understood, watching him, that this was a man who had spent his whole life pouring himself into beautiful things and beautiful people, and that Yegor, the granite oilman, was one of them.
"He plays nothing," Tomás confided to Tanisha in a staged whisper, jerking his thumb at Yegor. "Not one instrument. Pavel has tried for thirty years. The man can run an oil empire and cannot hold a violin without it sounding like a cat stuck in a door."
"This is true," Yegor admitted gravely. "I have no musical talent at all."
"You have some," Pavel said, and there was something underneath it, he glanced at Tanisha when he said it. "Lately. A little. I have noticed."
It was, Tanisha thought, the best evening she'd had in years.
It was Pavel who pulled her aside, near the end, while Yegor and Tomás argued cheerfully over the last of the wine in the next room about whether Houston or S?o Paulo had worse traffic.
"I am going to tell you something," Pavel said, his English accented, his dark eyes serious now. "And I am going to say it plainly, because Yegor will never say it and someone should."
"Okay," Tanisha said.
"I have known Yegor since we were six years old," Pavel said.
"Six. I have known him through all of it.
His father. The wife who left. The day we put his father in the ground.
I know him better than his own sister knows him, I think…
" He held her gaze. "He has never brought a woman to meet me.
Not even when he was married. Twenty-eight years of friendship, and you are the first woman he has ever brought to my table.
You should know that. I do not think he knows it himself. But you should know it."
Tanisha didn't know what to say.
"He told me you are a business arrangement," Pavel went on, a small smile playing at his mouth.
"On the telephone, last month. Very serious.
Very flat. It is only an arrangement, Pavlik, do not make it strange.
" His smile widened. "And then tonight I watch him laugh like a boy, watch him watch you when you are not looking, and I think, Yegor, my friend, you beautiful idiot.
You have arranged yourself right into something you swore off forever. "
*****
That night, back at the dacha, Tanisha couldn't sleep.
She found Yegor outside.
He was standing in the dacha's small walled garden, coatless despite the cold, his breath clouding, snow falling soft and steady around him and settling on the dark bristle of his hair.
He was looking up at the sky, at the impossible northern stars, and he didn't hear her come out until she was nearly beside him.
"You'll freeze," she said.
"I grew up in this," he said. "Houston made me soft." He glanced at her, the starlight and the snow caught the gray of his eyes. "You should be asleep."
"I couldn't."
"Why not?"
She looked at him. The soft boy from the photograph and the granite man from the boardroom, standing in the snow in the country that had made him, the man who had never brought a woman to Pavel's table, the man who had been a vault for twelve years and had, somewhere in the last month, started letting her in through a door she didn't think, he knew, was now opening.
She didn't think about it. That was becoming a pattern with this man, the not thinking, the simply doing.
She reached up, took his cold face in both her warm hands, and kissed him.
She kissed him. She started it. She had wanted, for weeks, to be clear to both of them that at least one time it had been her choice and not the storm's, not the contract's and not the performance's but hers.
He went still for half a second in surprise, and then his arms came around her and pulled her in against him.
He kissed her back in the falling snow like a man coming in from the cold for the first time in years.
When she finally pulled back, her hands still framing his face, snowflakes melting on both their lashes, she looked him dead in the eye and said the truest thing she had said since Vegas.
"Yegor," she said. "I'm not going to be a woman you brought."
He stared at her, and whatever he saw broke something open in his heart. He didn't answer with words at all.