Page 67 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

She still doesn’t look at me.

We’ve sat in silence so many times by now. This is different, still pained. “I need to tell you something,” I start.

“So you’ve said,” she sighs.

“I’d like to tell it to your face, if possible.”

Just as I begin to worry she’s going to give me the silent treatment through this, she turns, and the low dashboard illuminates her face—shedding light on the dark rings under her eyes that mimic my own, and the thin line of her pursed lips as she visibly braces herself. She looks exhausted and guarded, and so beautiful it makes my chest ache.

There’s no place to start, I suppose, but the beginning.

“When I was in my late-20s, I was betrothed to a woman to secure an alliance with another family in St. Petersburg. Irina. And you know about her, because I guess everyone in our world does. Just as they know that she died two years into our marriage,” I say. “What you—or almost anyone else—don’t know is how she died. The part I played in it.”

Darya has gone as still as the subject of a painting.

“I didn’t know about the thrombophilia until it was too late,” I say. “It’s a clotting disorder, a complication of her pregnancy from the second trimester. Though since I was always too busy to be at her fucking appointments, I didn’t know. So, I didn’t advocate for her. I slept by her side that night and awoke to her arresting. I wish I could say that it happened so fast that it’s a blur to me, but it’s not. I remember everything.” My hands clutch at the steering wheel, knuckles white from the grip. “I was there for all of it. I was in the room. I was holding her hand, and I watched it happen, and there was nothing… nothing I could do.”

“I should have told you that,” I say. “Before I proposed, or after the wedding, or, fuck, at any point in the weeks between when you moved into the manor and the night you told me about the baby. Our baby. I should have told you because you deserved that information. That’s on me. I know it is. I think I wanted to keep it separate from what we were building—to not taint it with my history.”

Darya hasn’t moved.

“When you told me you were pregnant,” I say, “I heard it, and I went somewhere I couldn’t get back from quickly enough. I believe the technical term is ‘dissociation’. But it’s not because I don’t want this. That I don’t want you. If anything, the opposite is true. Because the last time I was in this situation, I lost everything. Everything. And when you said those words, my body was right back to that hospital room twelve years ago. My mind shut down. I know I shut down. I watched myself do it, and I couldn’t stop it, and you were standing right there needing me not to, and I—” I clench my jaw to aching. “I let you down. You said I am a failure, and it’s true. I failed you. I couldn’t get out of my own way to get to you.”

My voice is thick with tears I can’t shed.

Then Darya says, “I understand. I see you.”

“I know,” I say. “I know you—”

“No.” Her voice is patient, but it has a hard edge to it for me to meet. “I mean that I’ve seen you for a while now. The way you count things when you’re anxious. The way you can’t sleep unless you’ve checked the door. The way you go somewhere behind your eyes when something catches you off-guard, and you need a second to come back, to ground yourself.” She holds my gaze, a steady flame. “I’ve seen all of it. I’ve been watching you since I met you. Even when I haven’t wanted to, you’ve dragged me in and held me transfixed.” She swallows. “I wasn’t asking you to be uncomplicated. I know you aren’t. You’re difficult. As am I. But I—”

“What did you need?” I ask.

“I just needed you to be my equal. Be scared, but respect me enough to simply tell me you are. To not make me another person on the periphery of your control. I needed you to let me be the one person you do let in because I’ve let you in, Anton, past the point where I can get you out from under my skin. And when you told me to go, it felt exactly like the first time you dismissed me. Like I was a gnat you could just swat away.”

A gnat. My heart sinks. My hands quiver as they reach for her—and it’s everything to me that she lets me. “You’re not a fucking gnat, Darya. You’re the woman I am in love with. The woman who has turned my life right side up.”

Out of all the things I’d think a woman would say to an admission of love, her reply isn’t anywhere on that list. But that’s my wife, isn’t it? Unorthodox. Cutting me down to the core. Leveling my world.

“Boris came to see me,” she says. “At the atelier.”

“I know.”

Her eyes sharpen. “Did you send him?”

“No,” I say. And then, because she’ll know if I’m not entirely forthcoming: “I wouldn’t do that. I was giving you space. And he’s acting bizarrely. I’m having him followed.”

I look on as Darya mulls that over. Until, at last, she accepts my words with a single nod of confirmation.

“He said that Irina was the love of your life.”

There’s no inflection in her voice at the end to signify it being a question. But there’s one in her eyes.

“She was a love of my life,” I say. “She was a person I chose to love, and I’m glad I did, even if I had to lose her afterward, and that will always be a true thing. But it isn’t the truest thing about me.” I hold her gaze. “The way I feel about you is the truest thing. What this is—what you and I have been building together since we stepped off that altar and you carried me through our wedding, and you and I set something in motion between us. And then we consummated that bond—” Darya raises her brows at my choice of words. I pat around inside myself for better ones. “And you became a part of me.”

Her eyes are shining now, even in the near-dark.

“You’ve changed everything,” I say.