Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
I’m crying. I don’t wipe the tears. I let them come because I’m done hiding from this man and I’m done buttoning my cardigan to my throat and I’m done being brave and composed and Idaho-strong. I’m a young woman standing in a penthouse in Monaco with a baby in her belly and tears on her face and the truth in her mouth and if he doesn’t believe me this time I will survive it because I have survived everything else, but I need him to believe me. Just once. Just this once.
ANTON
I cross the room.
I don’t interpret. I don’t calculate. I don’t read her micro-expressions or assess the probability that she’s performing sincerity or construct a narrative about what her tears mean. For the first time in my life, I stop reading and I just listen, and what I hear is a woman who has told me the truth from the very first day and who is standing in my penthouse with tears on her face telling me again and I believe her.
I just believe her.
My hands find her face. Both hands. Her cheeks are wet and warm and her eyes are brown and bright and terrified and furious and full of something that I have been misreading since a conference room and a file with yellow tabs, and I am holding her face and I’m not performing and she’s not performing and for the first time there is nothing between us except the truth.
“Say it again.”
“It’s you.”
I kiss her.
Not the Ace Royale kiss. Not the balcony kiss with the harbour below and the music behind and the taste of champagne. Not the seduction, not the man who reads people, not the experiment or the thesis or the investigation. Just me. Just Anton. My mouth on hers. My hands shaking against her cheeks the way they shook the night I destroyed her, except this time the shaking means something completely different. This time the shaking means I believe you. I believe you. I have always been wrong and you have always been right and I believe you.
She kisses me back.
Her hands come to my chest, that same place, that same spot where she put her palm in a file room and didn’t push, and this time she doesn’t push either. This time she grabs. Her fingers close on my shirt and she pulls me closer and her mouth opens under mine and the sound she makes isn’t broken like it was in her apartment. This sound is whole. Fierce. The sound of a woman who has been fighting to be believed for almost every moment of her life and has finally, finally been heard.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. Her forehead against mine. Her breath on my mouth. Her hands fisted in my shirt. My hands on her face. The baby between us, moving against my abdomen that I feel through both our clothes and that breaks something open in me that I will never be able to close.
“You don’t get to misread me again,” she tells me.
“Never.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She presses her forehead harder against mine. Her eyes are closed. Her tears are drying on the cheeks I’m still holding. Her hands are still fisted in my shirt. And her voice, when it comes, is the voice of a girl from Idaho who walked into a file room and put her hand on a monster’s chest and didn’t push and who has been waiting, since that moment, for the monster to stop letting her go.
“Then stop letting me go.”
I pull her closer. I wrap my arms around her and the baby and the truth and I hold on. I hold on like Andrei held my hand at our father’s funeral, so hard the bones creak, so hard it says I’m never letting go of this, not for my pride, not for my certainty, not for the years of reading people that told me love was the exception and not the rule.
She was the rule.
She was always the rule.
And I’m done letting her go.
Epilogue
FIVE MONTHS LATER
The chapel was small.
Not the white roses at the altar, not the judge with his reading glasses pushed up his nose, not the afternoon light pressing through the stone windows in long pale columns. The smallness was the first thing Anton registered. He had spent his entire adult life in rooms designed to impress, spaces that announced wealth before the first word was spoken, and this chapel on the edge of the Almazov estate was the opposite of all of that. Stone walls. Wooden pews worn smooth by decades of hands. The smell of beeswax and something green from the gardens outside.
He stood at the altar and he did not read the room.
Fifteen years of reading every room he entered. Cataloguing exits and allegiances, building his thesis before the door had fully opened, in boardrooms, in casinos, in restaurants, in a law firm conference room on a bright Monday morning that had cost him the only thing that had ever mattered. So he stood at the altar of this small stone chapel and he let the room be what it was. He did not turn it into information.