Page 33 of My Wedding Night Massacre

We sit like that for a long time, the car moving through the city, Misha driving without asking where, because he knows where, back to the villa, the only place we have. The silence between us isn’t empty. It’s full of three years of everything that doesn’t have words yet, all of it sitting in the back seat between us, waiting for someone to know what to do with it.

Nobody speaks.

The city keeps moving. Outside the window, a woman pushes a stroller on the pavement, a child inside it, dark hair, wrong age. I see Pavlina’s eyes go to it from the corner of my vision. The reflex. I file that away too, with everything else I’ve been filing, and I keep looking out the window while the city pulls us north.

22

Pavlina

The villa smells like stone, old wood, and nothing I recognize.

That’s the first thing that lands when Misha opens the door, and Slava puts his hand on my back to guide me through. Not a grip, just a presence, warm through the ivory fabric. I walk because my legs still work even when the rest of me has stopped cooperating. The entrance opens into a long room with maps on a table, two laptops, and evidence that people have been living and working here for weeks. I take it in without processing any of it. My brain has been running on a very narrow band since the church, and everything outside that band is just texture.

Misha says something to Slava in a low voice. Slava answers, and then Misha disappears down a corridor. He doesn’t come back, which leaves the two of us and the silence that’s been sitting between us since the car.

I’m still in the dress. I became aware of this again somewhere on the drive north, the ivory fabric wrong against the seat, wrong in this room, wrong on my body for a morning that stopped being what it was supposed to be the moment those church doors opened. I reach back, find the top button, unbutton it, then stop because my hands aren’t working properly. There are too many buttons, and I don’t know what I’m going to do when the dress is off.

“Pavlina,” Slava says.

I look at him.

He’s standing near the table with the maps, jacket off now, sleeves rolled. He looks like himself. He looks exactly like himself, which shouldn’t still be arresting me at this point, but it is, my eyes running over his face again, looking for the crack in it, the place where the image breaks down, and I’m back in my bedroom alone on a Friday morning with a pill wearing off and nothing but the ceiling.

There isn’t one. He just keeps being there.

“We need to talk,” he says.

“I know,” I say. I don’t move toward him or away. I stay near the door with one button undone at my back and my hands not entirely in my control. “So talk.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“I don’t know, Slava. Three years ago? When you decided not to tell me you were alive? Pick one.”

His jaw tightens. “It wasn’t that simple.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.” My voice comes out flat. “I’m sure it was very complicated for you, being alive.”

He looks at me, and there’s something in his face that isn’t patience, that’s holding patience in place by force. “I didn’t know if I could trust you. In fact, I still don’t.”

The words land. I hear them the way you hear something when you weren’t braced for it, the full weight arriving before you can get your hands up.

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“You were gone before the lights went out,” he says. It’s not an accusation, or at least he’s not trying to make it one, but it lands like one anyway. “That’s a fact. You weren’t where you were supposed to be. The attack was coordinated, and you were already gone before it started.”

I look at him for a long moment. “You thought I knew.”

He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t need to. His face does all the answering.

“You thought I was part of it,” I say. The flatness in my voice has cracked somewhere, and what’s underneath is rawer than I want it to be. “You were alive for three years, and you thought I helped him do it.”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“You clearly did,” I say. “You clearly had a thought, and you kept it for three years while I was in that house grieving you. While Denis.” I stop because Denis is too big to fit in this sentence right now, too much to hand him without preparation. I pull back from it. “You watched me almost marry someone else this morning.”

“Yes.”

“And before this morning? Before you decided to come through a church door? Was there a plan to tell me at some point, or were you just going to let that happen?”