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)
Blythe was in the third pew, wearing green, Jeff's hand in hers. Peterson, the architect from the ninth floor, the man Anton had tracked through a penthouse window for months with his jaw set and his chest cored out, the man who had turned out to be exactly what he appeared to be. Decent. Capable of making a woman laugh without needing the room to notice. Anton had a word for men like that. His father's word, which Anton had spent thirty-five years applying to the wrong things.
Someone good.
He was learning what it meant to be one.
Nanny Bertha sat at the end of the pew with Aria against her chest. The baby's head was tucked beneath Bertha's chin, one small fist curled against the white lace of her collar, asleep with the absolute authority of someone who hadn’t yet learned that the world had opinions about the hour. Aria Blythe Almazov. Six weeks old. The most inconvenient, disorienting, annihilating thing that had ever happened to him.
In the delivery room, the midwife had placed her in his arms and she had opened her eyes, grey and unfocused, not yet seeing him, and every thesis he had ever built about what people were and what they wanted had dissolved into a single truth: he did not know how to do this. He was a man who read people. She was a person he could not read. She communicated in need and warmth and the periodic devastation of her own hunger, and he had no framework for any of it, and he had never in his life been more grateful to be wrong.
Daisy's parents were in the front pew. Her mother had cried at the airport. Her father had shaken Anton's hand in the arrivals hall with the gravity of a man from Cork, Idaho who had driven a long way on a bad heater and intended to make the handshake count. They had not been seduced by Monaco, by the building on the coast road, by the staff who moved around their daughter with trained efficiency. They had assessed Anton instead. Her mother had sat with him and Aria for a long time without speaking, and then she had nodded once, and he had understood without being told what the nod meant.
He was learning how to deserve it.
Andrei was in the second pew. Ciana's hand was in his, her head tilted toward his shoulder, and his twin wore the expression he reserved for occasions that moved him: composed on the surface, everything else working underneath. Andrei had been the first call on the night Daisy said it's always been you. His twin had listened to the whole wreck of it without a word, and when Anton had finished, Andrei had said: go back. Go back now. The most useful thing anyone had ever said to him.
Artem was against the far wall with his arms folded and Star beside him, her shoulder against his arm. He had the focused attention of a man who understood the exact weight of what was about to happen because he had stood somewhere similar himself, not so long ago, holding the hand of a girl in a spa uniform and finding that the world had rearranged itself around something he hadn't seen coming.
Alexei was at the back.
He stood apart, hands clasped behind him, face giving nothing. He had flown in that morning from a meeting Anton had not asked about and would not ask about. There were things Alexei was assembling, had been assembling with the patience of a man who had made fifteen years of waiting into precision, and they were nearly done. He had met Anton's eyes when he arrived and said nothing, and the nothing had held everything: acknowledgment, approval, the version of warmth that Alexei expressed through the absence of coldness, which Anton had spent years learning to receive as the gift it was.
The doors at the back of the chapel opened.
Anton turned.
She was wearing ivory. Simple, close-fitted, nothing elaborate, because Daisy Fletcher had never in her life performed for a room and was not about to begin at her own wedding. Her hair was down. Her parents' faces when she passed their pew did the thing parents' faces do at weddings, pride and grief and time, all at once, and she reached out and touched her mother's hand as she passed without breaking stride.
She came toward him. Her eyes found his halfway down the aisle and held.
He had been wrong about her in every possible way. Wrong about her motives, her innocence, the smile in the aftermath that he had filed as performance and which had been, simply, love. The wrongness had a shape now, a dimension he could measure, and what he understood standing at this altar was that he would spend the rest of his life making sure she never had to fight that hard to be believed again.