Chapter 13
"Don't," Yegor said. "Don't do this."
"Don't do what?" Tanisha zipped the duffel bag closed with a violent jerk. "Don't be smart? Because being smart is the only thing that's kept me alive this long, Yegor, and I forgot how to do it for one month and look where it got me. Look where it got us both. It's on every screen in America."
"That's not…"
"I was a fool." Her voice cracked, and she hated it, hated that he could hear it.
"I was a fool, and you know the worst part? I knew better. knew exactly what happens to women like me who let themselves believe in men like you. And I let myself believe it anyway. I let myself believe a billionaire’s home could be a place for me.
That's not your fault. That's mine. I knew what I was getting myself into and I let myself forget everything that came before. "
"It is a real place." He took a step toward her, and she stepped back, and the hurt that flashed across his face nearly broke her resolve. "Tanisha. Whatever that contract said. Whatever it started as. You know it stopped being that. You know it. I know you know it."
"It doesn't matter what it became." She slung the bag over her shoulder.
"It matters what it is now. And what it is now is a viral joke that just took down the only thing keeping Dorian away from me.
I can't be here. Being here is what's dangerous.
The cameras are leaving and he's out there and the smartest thing I can do, the only thing I can do, is disappear.
I should have stayed invisible in the first place. "
And there it was. The moment. The thing she would think about for the rest of her life, because for one second she stood in the doorway of his closet with her bag on her shoulder, and she gave him an opening, and she watched him stand at the edge of the truest thing he had ever felt and fail to say it.
Because Yegor had been carrying a declaration in his chest for weeks.
He had been carrying it since the night of the candles.
He had felt it crystallize completely in Russia while she lay against his heart and asked him what happened at day ninety.
I love you. Three words. He had built an empire on the back of harder things than three words.
He had stared down boards, oligarchs and a dying father.
And standing there in the wreckage, with the only woman he had ever chosen walking out of his life, the vault that twelve years had built around his heart simply would not open in time.
What came out instead was the wrong thing. The coward's version. The version a man says when he is too afraid to say the real one.
"Stay," he said. "Just, stay until they catch him. Then go if you must. Just stay until you're safe."
The words landed in the room and died there.
Tanisha looked at him for a long, long moment, and he watched her face change, then he understood, far too late, exactly what she had heard.
"Until they catch him," she repeated softly.
"Tanisha,"
"Not stay because you want me. Stay because of the ex.
" A terrible, quiet laugh came out of her.
"Stay because I'm a problem you haven't finished solving yet.
Stay because the great Yegor Tarasoff makes problems disappear and I'm just the last one on the list." She shook her head, and tears began to flow from her eyes, and she let them flow, because she was past hiding it now.
"I left one man who wanted to keep me safe in a cage.
I'm not doing it again. Not even a beautiful cage. Not even yours."
"That's not what I…"
"I know it's not." And that was the worst part, the thing that finally pushed her out the door.
"I know it's not what you meant. That's the whole problem, Yegor.
You meant something so much better. I could see it on your face.
You meant something real, and you said until they catch him instead, and if you can't say it now, if you can't say it standing here watching me leave, then it doesn't matter that you feel it.
A feeling you can't say isn't a place I can live. "
She walked past him, down the great staircase, out the front door of the limestone palace, and Yegor, who had never in his life chased anyone, stood frozen at the top of his own stairs and let her go, because the three words were still stuck in his throat, and by the time they came loose, the door had already closed.
*****
Mama Boone took one look at her granddaughter on the porch and knew everything.
It was past midnight when Tanisha's rideshare pulled up to the sagging bungalow off Jefferson Street, the wisteria black against the streetlight, the screen door slapping twice.
Mama Boone was waiting up, because she always knew, the same way she'd known about the cooking competition before the phone rang, the same way she'd known about Dorian a full year before Tanisha would say it out loud.
She opened the door and looked at Tanisha standing there with her old duffel bag and her ruined face, and she didn't ask a single question.
"Child," she said gently, "you are in love with that white boy."
She cried.
She dropped the bag on the porch and folded into her grandmother's small fierce arms and cried like something inside her had finally cracked all the way open, great heaving sobs eighteen months in the making, and Mama Boone held her up on the dark porch and rocked her.
She said nothing at all, because there was nothing to say that the crying wasn't already saying better.
"I let myself love him, Mama," Tanisha got out, finally, between the sobs. "I knew better and I did it anyway."
"Course you did." Mama Boone smoothed the cornrows back from her wet face. "That's the only way it's ever done, baby. Nobody falls in love who knew better. Knowing betters got nothing to do with it."
She got Tanisha inside and onto the old sofa then made her a cup of tea she didn't drink, and she sat with her in the lamplight.
Mama Boone did not say I told you so, though she could have.
She did not say good riddance to that rich white boy, though Tanisha half wished she would, because it would have been easier than the truth.
"You want to know about your grandfather," Mama Boone said instead.
"Mama…"
"Hush, I'm telling you a thing." She settled back.
"When I met Cornelius Boone, I had decided I was never marrying.
I had a teaching position and my own money and a mother who'd been left by a man, and I had looked at that whole arrangement and decided, no thank you, I will keep my own name and my own bank account and my own peace.
And then your grandfather sat behind me in a lecture at Fisk for one entire semester and never said a word, just held the door, every single day, for sixteen weeks.
" Her eyes had gone soft and far away. "And on the last day he finally spoke, and you know what he said?
He said, 'Miss Ellison, I have been trying to think of something clever to say to you since September and I have nothing.
I just like you. I'm sorry it isn't more impressive than that.
'" Mama Boone laughed, a small wet sound.
"Forty-one years we had. And the whole forty-one, the man could never once find the clever thing to say. He just liked me. He just stayed."
She looked at her granddaughter.
"Some men have all the words and none of the staying," she said.
"And some men can't find a single word to save their lives, but they hold the door for sixteen weeks and would cross a whole country in the dark if needed.
You watch which one this Russian turns out to be baby.
Don't listen to what he said. Watch what he does. "
Tanisha didn't answer. But she stopped crying, a little.
*****
Renata came the next morning; the second Tanisha called her.
She lived ten minutes away, her bakery sat right next to where Tanisha's truck parked, two Nashville businesses that had grown up side by side, and she came barreling through Mama Boone's screen door with a box of pastries and a face full of righteous fury.
She took one look at Tanisha curled on the old sofa and climbed right onto it with her.
"Okay," Renata said, pulling Tanisha's head onto her shoulder. "Tell me everything and then tell me whether I need to drive to Houston and key a Bugatti."
A wet laugh came out of Tanisha. "He'd just buy another one."
"Then I'll key that one too. I have nothing but time and rage." Renata's voice softened. She tucked a loose braid behind Tanisha's ear. "T, Talk to me. What happened?"
So Tanisha told her. The candles. The snow. The dacha. The headline. The closet. Stay until they catch him. All of it, the whole impossible month, while Renata listened and fed her a cheese danish she didn't want and held her hand.
"And here's what's killing me," Tanisha said. "I keep waiting to feel relieved. I got out. I did the smart thing. I should feel safe. And instead I feel like I left half of myself standing at the top of a staircase in River Oaks."
Renata was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, she'd lost her jokey persona entirely.
"Listen to me, because I'm only going to say the wise friend thing once and then I'm going back to being unhinged about the car.
" She took Tanisha's face in both hands.
"If that man doesn't come for you, if he lets you sit in your grandmother's house and disappear to Portland and never fights for you, then he was never going to be enough anyway, and you found that out cheap, you cry it out and you move on and you build the most beautiful restaurant Portland has ever seen.
" She paused. "But I've been listening to you talk for an hour, and I watched your face when you got to the part about the snow.
And I'm telling you, T. I think he's coming. "
*****
He was not, at that moment, coming.
At that moment, Yegor was making a thorough and undignified mess of falling apart.