23. Mira
MIRA
The event space downtown still smelled like fresh paint and someone else's ambition, the whole room soaring windows and raw brick, the kind of place some designer had decided meant industrial luxury.
Katya stood in the middle of the empty floor with a binder pressed to her chest like a hymnal, turning in a slow circle as if she could feel the room's opinions radiating up through her shoes.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I've been thinking about this since three this morning, so bear with me."
"It's an auto show unveiling," Zoya said from a folding chair near the far wall, not looking up from the floor plan spread across her lap. "It's not a wedding."
"Every event is a wedding if you care enough," Katya said, and I laughed before I could stop myself, a real laugh, and for one clean second I forgot what was sitting in my chest like a stone I'd swallowed and couldn't cough back up.
It didn't last. It never lasted more than a few seconds anymore.
We had three folding tables pushed together at the center of the room, covered in seating charts and press lists and a scale model of the vehicle platform that Damian's people and my father's people had spent eleven months arguing into existence, the Kozlov-Northline armored line.
My father's company built the bones, Damian's people built the parts nobody was supposed to talk about out loud, and somewhere in the middle of all that was a marriage that had started as a debt and had turned, against every reasonable expectation I'd walked in with, into something I didn't know how to protect anymore without a map.
I sat with a legal pad in front of me, a pen in my hand, and I hadn't written a single useful thing in twenty minutes.
"Florals," Katya said, flipping the binder open to a tabbed section I recognized with dread. She had actual tabs. They were color-coded. "I've narrowed it to three concepts and I need you both to keep an open mind."
"I have three concepts too," Zoya said. "Concept one, nobody stands in front of a window with a clear line to the street. Concept two, the press pen doesn't have a sightline to the loading doors. Concept three, I don't care about flowers."
"That's not a floral concept, that's a personality," Katya said. "Concept one is called Steel Bloom. It's white orchids against gunmetal vases, very sleek, very we-build-armored-trucks-but-we-have-a-soul."
"No," Zoya said.
"You haven't even seen the mood board."
"I've seen you," Zoya said. "That's enough data."
Katya turned to me instead, eyes bright, and I made myself smile because that was the version of me this room needed, easy and unbothered, a woman thinking about orchids and not about a shell company with a name like a bad omen sitting three layers deep in her father's books.
Northgate. I hadn't said the word out loud in weeks.
I'd started to feel like if I never said it, it might eventually stop being true, the way you can convince yourself a bruise doesn't hurt if you just don't press on it.
Except I kept pressing on it, constantly, quietly, in the middle of conversations about orchids.
"Show me," I said, and meant it, because at least this was a problem with an actual solution.
Katya slid the binder across the table, and it was, against all odds, genuinely beautiful. Photographs of white orchids arranged in low steel bowls, clean lines, nothing fussy.
"It's pretty," I said.
"It's a start," Katya said, already flipping to the next tab.
"Concept two is bolder. I'm calling it Detroit Iron.
It'll be deep red garden roses and black dahlias, with actual chrome trim pieces woven through the arrangements so they look like real parts.
It's a salvage aesthetic, and it says we're not afraid of the machine. "
Zoya finally looked up. "You want scrap metal on the tables."
"It's curated scrap metal."
"Curated scrap metal is still a laceration risk at a press event with three hundred people holding wine."
"We'll sand the edges."
"You're not sanding a bumper trim, Katya."
"It's not a bumper trim, it's a stylized fender accent, and I already talked to a metal artist in Ferndale who does this for weddings."
"For weddings," Zoya repeated, flat, like the words themselves were the argument.
I laughed again, and it felt like cheating, laughing when there was a version of this same table where I told them both the truth and watched the whole room change shape around me.
I could see it happening in my head sometimes, uninvited, like a scene from a movie I hadn't agreed to watch.
Katya's face went still. Zoya's hand moved toward whatever she always had within reach.
Damian's voice went quiet in that specific way that meant he was already three steps ahead of whatever came next, already deciding what to do with the information, already deciding what to do about Niko.
Niko had taught me to ride a bike in the Kozlov driveway when I was seven, running behind me with one hand on the seat, telling me not to look at my feet, to look instead at where I wanted to go.
Niko had signed off on Northgate's paperwork for years without so much as a raised eyebrow from anyone who might have caught it, because who would think to look at Niko.
I pressed my thumbnail into the pad of my finger under the table, hard enough to leave a small white crescent, and came back to the room.
"What's concept three?" I asked, because I needed the room to keep moving.
"It's boring," Katya admitted. "It's just white hydrangea and greenery, very corporate and very forgettable, the concept you pick if you're a coward."
"We're picking concept three," Zoya said.
"You don't get a vote on aesthetics. You have a vote on exits."
"Exits are the only part of this event that matters," Zoya said, tapping the floor plan.
"Which is why I need everyone to look at this instead of a photograph of a dahlia.
We have one main entrance, one loading dock entrance in the rear, and a service corridor that connects to the kitchen and then to a stairwell that goes to street level.
I want that stairwell locked from the inside and manned, full stop. "
"Who's going to man it?" I asked, grateful for a question with an actual answer.
"It'll be two of ours. They won't be rentals, and they won't be the venue's people. I don't trust a security company that also does quinceaneras."
"They do good work," Katya said.
"They do balloon arches," Zoya said. "This is a room full of press, half our guest list, half your father's, and a vehicle platform that people have already tried to burn down once. I would like to not repeat that."
The word landed in the room without her meaning it to come anywhere near me specifically, and I felt it anyway, low and sudden, like missing a stair in the dark.
The warehouse fire came rushing back, the one that traced back to the same tangle of shell paperwork that had Niko's signature at the top and a trustee's name I'd never heard before buried at the bottom, if you followed it long enough through enough shell layers and public filings to find it.
Boris Vasiliev was a name that meant nothing and everything at once, a name I'd said in my head so many times it had started to lose its edges, worn smooth from repetition alone.
"Let's talk about the guest list," I said, too quickly, and reached for the folder like it might steady my hands. "Where are we on final numbers?"
"Your father's team sent an updated list this morning," Zoya said, sliding a printed sheet toward me. "I flagged four names I want run again before badges go out."
"Which four are they?"
"Two vendors nobody can confirm actually exist under those names, one journalist who's asked Bear more questions about our warehouse insurance than about the car, and one plus-one who didn't have a name attached, just 'guest of.'"
"People do that," Katya said.
"People who aren't hiding anything put a name on the form," Zoya said, and I had to look down at the paper in my hands because that sentence, said so casually, so entirely unaimed at me, still managed to find the one soft place in my chest and press directly on it.
My phone buzzed against the table before I had to answer either of them.
Damian's name on the screen did something to my stomach that it had no business still doing after this many weeks of being his wife. I answered it walking a few steps away from the table, toward the bank of windows, my back to the room.
"Tell me you're not letting Katya put actual car parts on the tables," he said, and I could hear the almost-smile in it, the version of his voice that only came out when he wasn't in front of other people.
"She's calling it curated," I said. "Zoya's calling it a lawsuit."
"Zoya's usually right about lawsuits."
"Zoya's usually right about everything. It's exhausting."
He laughed, low, and for a second the phone against my ear felt like the only honest thing in the room.
I thought, with a kind of vertigo, that I could just say it now, right now, with his voice already soft and unguarded on the other end of the line and no one watching my face.
Damian, I need to tell you something, and I don't know how to start, but it's about Niko, and I found it weeks ago, and I've been carrying it alone because I didn't know what it would do to you, to us, to my father, and I'm so tired of carrying it by myself.
"Damian," I said.
"Yeah."
I heard Bear's voice somewhere behind him, low and urgent in that particular register that meant work, not chatter, and Damian said, half to me and half already turning away, "Hold that thought, Bear's got something on the loading schedule, give me one second," and then there was a muffled shift of sound, his hand over the phone, his voice going elsewhere.
By the time he came back, saying, "Sorry, what were you saying?" the moment had already closed over itself like water. I looked at the shape of it in my mind, still warm, already gone.
"Nothing," I said. "Ask Katya about the fender accents when you get a chance. I want to see your face when she explains it."
"Is it that bad?"
"Worse."
He laughed again, said he'd swing by later if the site meeting ran short, and hung up.
I stood at the window for one more second with the phone still in my hand, furious at Bear for a request that wasn't his fault, furious at myself for being furious about it, furious at the entire architecture of my own cowardice that needed an interruption to keep itself standing.
I went back to the table. Katya was now explaining to Zoya, with real patience, that the metal artist could absolutely round the edges further if it made her feel better.
"It won't," Zoya said.
"You haven't even seen the finished piece."
"I've seen you get excited about something that then requires a waiver."
I sat and picked the pen back up and made myself useful for the better part of an hour, working through press credentials and parking logistics and whether we needed a second check-in table for overflow.
It helped, because work always did, giving my hands and my mouth something to do that wasn't the thing my whole body wanted to do, which was to find Damian and put the weight down before it crushed something in me on its own schedule instead of mine.
He came by a little after five, still in his suit jacket, tie loosened, looking like a man who'd had one meeting go right after a stretch of meetings that hadn't. Bear trailed in a step behind him, already deep in some story that had Damian shaking his head.
"No," Damian was saying, "he did not actually say that to the fire marshal."
"It was word for word," Bear said. "I was standing right there. Man looks the fire marshal dead in the eye and goes, 'Sir, that's not a hazard, that's a design feature.'"
Damian laughed. Really laughed, head tipping back slightly, the sound coming out of him loose and unpracticed in a way I almost never got to see, because most of what he showed the world, even me, most days, was carefully held.
This wasn't that. This was a man who for one unguarded moment had forgotten to hold anything at all.
I felt the words rise again, right at the base of my throat, Damian, there's something I have to tell you. I even turned toward him, I actually turned my body in his direction like my feet had decided before the rest of me had.
And then I watched him laugh again at whatever Bear said next, watched the lines around his eyes ease more than I'd seen all week, watched him look, for one whole unbroken minute, like a man who wasn't carrying anything heavier than a bad joke about a fire marshal, and I couldn't do it.
I could not be the one to reach over and put my hand on that ease and take it away from him.
Not here, not with Katya three feet away debating hydrangea, not with the words still unproven, still resting on a trustee's name I couldn't even fully explain to myself yet.
Later, I told myself, once I knew more, once it wasn't just a name and a bad feeling.
I folded the guest list closed and smoothed it flat with my palm, like that might smooth something else too.
I'd used that word so many times now that it had started to feel thin under my hands, worn through in the middle like fabric folded too many times along the same crease, and some small honest part of me knew exactly what that meant: I was down to the last few reasons I had left, and none of them were going to hold much longer.
I looked at Damian across the room, still laughing, still open, more undone by that than anything cruel could have managed, and all I could think, with a dread that settled into my chest like cold water, was that I had no idea how I would ever say Niko's name out loud to him without breaking something in us that had only just, finally, started to feel like it might survive.