I Do

The judge is waiting. Two hundred people are waiting. Somewhere behind you, your aunt Galya is crying into a napkin.

Dmitri Belov hasn't let go of your hand.

He leans in, close enough that the guests will think he's saying something sweet, close enough that you smell cedar and cold air, and he speaks so low only you can hear.

"Do you want to be here?"

It's not the question you expected. You expected where is she or how dare you. You stare at him. Up close he's worse, meaning better: gray eyes with a dark ring around them, a thin white scar cutting through his left eyebrow, a mouth that looks like it has never once been careless.

"If the answer is no," he says, "turn around and walk out. Nobody will stop you. I'll handle your father. The debt is my problem, not yours."

Your heart is slamming so hard the lace on your bodice moves.

He means it. You can hear that he means it. You've spent five years listening to people lie under oath, and this man is not lying.

"And if I stay?"

"Then you stay." A pause. "Your choice, Ava. Not his. Not mine."

You look past his shoulder at your father, who is gripping the back of a gold chair like it's the rail of a sinking ship. You look at the firebird your mother loved.

"I'm staying," you say.

Something moves behind his eyes, too fast to name. He straightens and nods to the judge.

"We're ready."

The ceremony is a blur of Russian and English and the judge mispronouncing Lisitsyna twice. When he gets to the vows, Dmitri's jacket buzzes against your arm.

He doesn't take the phone out. Not right away. But at "for better, for worse," his free hand slides into his pocket and his thumb moves over the screen, and he glances down for one second.

You see his face change.

It's barely anything. A muscle in his jaw. A stillness that goes deeper than the stillness he already had. If you weren't standing ten inches away, if you didn't read faces for a living, you'd have missed it.

Then he looks back up at you and says, "I do," in a voice so steady it sounds carved.

You say it too. Your voice cracks in the middle.

"You may kiss the bride."

The room tenses. He lowers his head, and you think, wildly, this is how my first kiss with my husband happens, in front of my aunt, and then his lips touch your forehead. Just there. Brief and warm.

Somebody exhales. Somebody starts clapping. Then all of Brighton Beach is on its feet.

The reception is surreal.

You eat nothing. You dance with your father, who cries into your shoulder, and with Uncle Misha, who steps on your feet and whispers, "Good girl. Smart girl. Don't let him see you scared."

And you dance with Dmitri.

He holds you correctly, one hand at your waist, the other folded around yours, with exactly an inch of air between your bodies. The band plays an old waltz your mother used to hum. People watch. People always watch him, you realize. Women at every table have gone quiet. A waiter nearly walks into a pillar.

"Everyone's staring," you murmur.

"At you."

"At you. You're..." You don't know how to finish that without embarrassing yourself.

"I'm used to it," he says, and turns you under his arm, smooth as water. "You're not. Look at me, not at them."

You look at him. It doesn't help.

"Your phone," you say. "During the vows. Something happened."

His hand doesn't tighten at your waist. His expression doesn't change. "Business."

"On your wedding day?"

"Especially on my wedding day." He spins you out and draws you back. "Smile. My mother is coming."

Larisa Belova is the kind of beautiful that has been sharpened over decades: silver-blond hair in a perfect twist, a dove-gray dress, pearls the size of chickpeas. She kisses the air beside your cheek and looks at you the way people look at a stain on a good tablecloth.

"So," she says in Russian. "The other one."

"Mama," Dmitri says. One word. It's enough. She smiles, and the smile doesn't reach anything.

"Welcome to the family, Ava," she says in English, and glides away.

You breathe out. "She hates me."

"She hates everybody for the first ten years." He watches her go, and his eyes are unreadable. "Don't take it personally."

At eleven, Gleb brings the car around: a black sedan with windows so dark they swallow the streetlights. You change out of the dress upstairs in Nika's empty room, into the jeans and sweater you wore this morning, and you stand for a minute holding her pillow, breathing her shampoo. Then you go.

Your father hugs you so hard on the curb that your ribs creak. "I'll fix this," he whispers. "I'll find her. I'll fix everything."

You don't tell him that's what he said about Mama.

The car slides north and east, over the bridges and onto the expressway. Brooklyn falls away behind you in orange light. Dmitri sits on the other side of the back seat, a full person's width away, and for a long time neither of you speaks.

Then he does.

"Here's how this works." He doesn't look at you; he looks at the road ahead, as if he's reading from a list he's already memorized. "You'll have your own room. It locks from the inside, and you'll have the only key. I won't have a copy. Nobody will."

You turn to stare at him.

"You'll have a car. Your own, in your name. You'll drive it wherever you want, whenever you want: work, your father, your friends. One of my people will follow at a distance, for your safety, but they won't stop you, and they won't report what you do to anyone but me, and only if you're in danger."

"Dmitri..."

"You'll keep your job. Your phone, your bank account, your life. I won't ask where you've been." A beat. "And when you want out, you tell me. The lawyers will file a quiet annulment. No scandal. No debt. Your father keeps his club. I'll say it was my decision."

Your throat is tight. "Why?"

He finally looks at you. In the passing light his face is all edges and shadow.

"Because you didn't choose me. You chose your father. I don't take what isn't offered."

"And what do you get?"

"A wife." Something dry at the corner of his mouth. "On paper. That's what I agreed to anyway."

"That's it?"

"No. One more thing." His voice changes, gets lower, harder, and for the first time tonight you understand why grown men in Brighton Beach cross the street when they see his car. "Nobody touches you. Nobody. Not my men, not my mother's friends, not anyone who wants something from me. That isn't a request I'm making of them."

You don't know what to say to that. So you say nothing, and the car turns onto a dark road lined with trees, and then there's water on your left, black and silver under the moon, and a high stone wall, and an iron gate with a gatehouse glowing gold.

Sandpiper Point.

The car stops at the gate. Dmitri reaches into his jacket and takes out a slim new phone, still in its plastic film, and holds it out to you.

"One number in it. Mine."

You take it. His fingers don't brush yours. He makes sure they don't.

"You have your own phone," he says. "This is for one thing. If anyone, anyone, contacts you about your sister, you call me on this before you breathe. Before you answer. Before you tell your father."

The gate begins to swing open. Your heart goes cold.

"Why would anyone contact me about Nika?"

He looks at you, and doesn't answer.