Page 38 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

I say it to Lev across the island with a smile you could perform surgery under, and I watch it do exactly what I want, which is nothing, and everything at the same time. He takes the mug. He knows this game because I learned it from watching him, the plain courtesy he uses on men he’s about to ruin, and I’ve turned it all the way up and pointed it at him across his own marble, and there’s not a thing he can do about it, because I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m being lovely. I’m being so lovely it should be a war crime.

“Vasilisa.”

“Milk’s in the little jug. Sugar’s in the bowl. Have a wonderful day being terrifying.” I roll toward the elevator where Danil’s waiting to drive me to the one place on earth that’s still mine. “Try not to stab anyone before lunch. Or do. I’m not your keeper. Turns out that’s your job, and you’ve got it covered.”

Four days of this. Four days of the penthouse turned into a beautifully appointed Antarctic, every surface gleaming, every please and thank you filed to a razor, and it’s working, I can see it working, I can see it landing on him in a way screaming never did. He’d have a comeback for screaming. He built a whole life out of being the last cold thing in the room, and I’ve out-colded him in his own house, and the millimeter at his mouth has gone flat and stayed flat, and good. Good. Let him feel what a locked door does from the inside.

The classroom saves me. It always saves me. Twenty-six six-year-olds don’t care that I married a liar, they care that Kevin ate the purple paint again and that it’s Ana’s turn to hold the reading beanbag and that the class hamster, Sir Nibbles, has done something concerning in his wheel. I sit in the middle of my glitter-storm, and I let them entomb me in construction paper and need, and for six hours a day I’m not a crate that travels well, I’m Miss Plaksin, who fixes things, and that’s a person I still recognize.

Poppy corners me at lunch with two coffees and the tiny chair.

“Okay. Talk. You’ve been doing the terrifying-calm thing for four days, and I’ve given you space because I’m a saint, but the space is over.” She folds into the chair, knees at her chin. “What did the husband do?”

So I tell her. The whole thing, who he is, who my mother was, why we got married, the file, the four months, the long lens, the rigged hand, the my-own-good speech and the locks, and Poppy listens with her whole body, no filter, no interruptions for once, and when I’m done she’s quiet for a full three seconds, which for Poppy is a geological age.

“I want to key his car,” she says finally.

“Poppy.”

“I know. I know he’d have it repainted before lunch and probably have the guy who sold me the key repainted too. It’s not about the outcome, Vasilisa, it’s about the gesture. A woman needs to feel she’s contributed.” She takes a savage bite of carrot. “He hunted you. For four months. And then he took care of you and supported you and made me almost like him, and it was all, what, asset maintenance?”

“That’s what I asked him.”

“And?”

“He didn’t say no.” My throat bobs and I drink coffee to drown it. “He never says no to the true thing. That’s the worst part. He’ll admit to hunting me across a card table like he’s confirming a lunch order, but the one time I needed him to lie, to just say something warm and human even if it wasn’t true, he locked me in instead. Who does that? Who looks at a woman who just found out the whole thing was a con and decides the move is guards?”

“A man who’s scared out of his mind,” Poppy says.

I look at her.

“I’m just saying.” She shrugs, and she’s not smiling. “I’ve watched a lot of men do a lot of stupid things in this parking lot at pickup. The scared ones and the cruel ones look identical from the outside, and the only way to tell them apart is whether they get worse or better when you stop performing for them. You’ve stopped performing. You’re doing the Antarctic thing. So watch which one he turns into. That’s the tell.”

I don’t have an answer for that, so I let the bell take it away.

My father’s waiting by my car when Danil brings me out at four.

I haven’t seen him in two months, not since the church, where he cried in the second row and reached his arm into the aisle, and I rolled past it like it wasn’t there. He looks worse than he did then. Thinner. The good suit’s gone, back to the old one with the frayed cuff, and his hands are shaking, that real tremor that’s the actual offensive part, the one that isn’t a performance. Danil steps between us until I lift one hand and wave him off.

“Vasya.” My father’s whole name for me, the child one. “Vasya, I know I’ve got no right.”

“You’ve got no right. We agree. Skip to the part where you want money.”

He flinches, and it’s genuine. It lands and slides off me both at once, the old flaw, the one that made me a teacher and keeps forgiving this man against every interest I’ve got. “He’s got me working it off. Etush. Down in Brighton, with my hands, at my age. I just need a little. A few hundred. To eat, Vasya, that’s all. I’m not gambling, I swear to you on your mother. I’m not gambling.”

“Don’t.” My voice turns gravelly. “Don’t swear on her. You don’t get her. You sold her daughter for three hundred and forty grand. You don’t get to put her name in your mouth to shake me down for lunch money in a parking lot in front of my kids’ school.”

And he does the thing he always does, the pivot to self-pity, the way he makes every conversation about the weight he carries, and he says it looking at his own shaking hands, barely to me at all, and he has no idea, no idea in the world, that he’s just pulled a pin.

“Everyone always wanted something from your mother’s name,” he mutters. “Her whole life it was men asking. Even before Etush there were men. Years ago, sniffing around, asking about her family, asking about you, I never told you because there was nothing to tell. I sent them off, what could I give them? I had nothing—”

The parking lot goes quiet in my ears.

“Wait.” I put a hand up. “Say that again.”

“What?”

“Men. Asking about her name. About me. You said years ago.” My mouth’s gone dry. “How many years ago, Papa?”