CHAPTER SIX
Suzanne
The flight from New York to Kazan with a connection in Moscow was eleven hours and forty minutes and Michelle spent approximately nine of those hours doing one of three things. Talking. Eating the airline food with an enthusiasm that Suzanne found both baffling and endearing given that it was airline food. Or sleeping with her mouth slightly open in a way she would deny completely if presented with evidence.
Suzanne spent those same nine hours reading, working through supplier emails and periodically looking over at Michelle with the expression of a person who had accepted, fully and without remaining resistance, that this was simply who her best friend was and that the world was better for it.
"You have to try this," Michelle said at some point over the Atlantic, holding out a bread roll with the conviction of someone presenting a significant discovery.
"It's a bread roll Michelle."
"It's an exceptional bread roll. I don't say this lightly."
"You say everything lightly."
"That's fair but I'm serious about this bread roll." She pushed it closer. "Try it."
Suzanne tried it. Completely ordinary. She chewed it with a neutral expression and handed the remaining portion back.
Michelle watched her face with the intensity of a scientist awaiting results. "Well?"
"It's a bread roll."
"You have no joy."
"I have plenty of joy. I just don't locate it in airline bread rolls."
Michelle ate the rest with the satisfied expression of someone who had decided the other person's opinion was simply wrong and moved on. Then she pulled her blanket up to her chin, turned to look at Suzanne with her cheek pressed against the headrest and said in a completely different tone, "How are you actually doing."
Suzanne didn't look up from her laptop immediately. She finished the sentence she was reading, closed it halfway and looked at Michelle. Green eyes steady. Not performing the question. Just asking it.
"I'm okay," Suzanne said. "Actually okay. Not the version that means I don't want to talk about it."
"I know the difference. I've catalogued all your okays over six years. I have a system."
"Of course you do."
"There's okay which means fine. Okay which means give me an hour. Okay which means absolutely do not push this. And okay which means I'm processing but I'm standing." She studied Suzanne's face. "That last one is what I'm seeing."
Suzanne looked at her for a moment. "You're annoyingly perceptive."
"I know." No pretence of modesty whatsoever. "It's one of my best qualities."
"It's also one of your most irritating ones."
"Those are often the same thing." Michelle pulled her blanket tighter. "He didn't deserve you. I want to say that clearly and on the record. Arnold Carrington didn't deserve a single day of the three years you gave him and the fact that it ended the way it did says everything about who he is and nothing about who you are."
Suzanne was quiet for a moment. Outside was nothing but dark and the distant suggestion of cloud. "I know that. I think I knew it before the end. I think I'd been knowing it for a while and choosing not to look at it directly."
"Because you're loyal," Michelle said. "It's one of your best qualities."
"Is it also one of my most irritating ones."
"Sometimes." The honesty that was its own form of love. "But mostly it's just one of your best ones." She reached over and squeezed Suzanne's hand once, quickly. "Two weeks in Russia. New air. New streets. New everything."
"New everything," Suzanne agreed.
Michelle's phone lit up on the tray table. She glanced at it and her whole face did the thing it only did for one person. Something warmer and more specific than her usual warmth.
"King David?" Suzanne said.
"Wants to know if we landed yet." Already typing. "I told him we're over the Atlantic and you're refusing to appreciate the bread rolls."
"You did not."
"I absolutely did." She showed Suzanne the screen. A response already there. Three words. Tell her I agree. Followed by a photograph of what appeared to be an exceptionally good meal on a very nice plate.
Suzanne looked at the photograph and then at Michelle. "He sent you a picture of his dinner."
"He sends me pictures of his food constantly." Said with the expression of someone describing their favourite thing. "He says food is how Nigerians say I'm thinking of you."
Something warm moved through Suzanne's chest. "That's actually true."
"I know. I looked it up." Michelle set the phone down and looked at her with an affection that wasn't pressing. "You'll like him. When you meet him properly. I know you have your process and I respect your process but he's going to pass it."
"You don't know that."
"I absolutely know that. I've watched you assess people for six years." She settled back. "He's a good man Suzanne. The real kind. Not the kind that performs goodness in public and stores the rest somewhere you can't see it."
Suzanne thought, briefly and without wanting to, about Arnold arriving at her show forty minutes late and kissing her cheek and saying you were incredible in the tone of a man reading lines he hadn't quite memorised.
"Good," she said. "He had better be."
"He is." Michelle closed her eyes. "Wake me up when we start descending."
"I won't wake you up."
"Then wake me up when they bring more bread rolls."
"I'm absolutely not waking you up for bread rolls Michelle."
But she did, twenty minutes later, when the trolley came past. Michelle accepted the bread roll with the expression of someone receiving exactly what they deserved and Suzanne looked out at the dark and felt something that was not quite contentment but was adjacent to it. The particular feeling of being in motion toward something unknown with someone you trust completely beside you.
She fell asleep somewhere over Europe and didn't dream about anything she could remember.
They landed in Moscow at six in the morning local time and the cold hit them the moment the jet bridge ended. Sharp and immediate and entirely serious about itself.
Michelle made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"It's November," Suzanne said.
"I know it's November. I packed for November." Michelle pulled her coat tight with both hands and looked around with wide eyes. "I didn't pack for this November."
"This is the airport. It's inside."
"It's inside and it's still this cold. What is it like outside."
"Colder."
Michelle looked at her. "You're enjoying this."
"I'm not enjoying this."
"You absolutely are. Your face is doing a thing."
Suzanne's face was not doing a thing. She picked up her carry-on and started walking toward the connecting gate and Michelle fell into step beside her still holding her coat closed with both hands like it might escape.
The connection to Kazan was two hours. They slept through most of it.
Kazan received them differently than Moscow had. The cold was the same but the air had something else in it. A quality Suzanne noticed the moment they stepped into the car Michelle's contact had arranged. The city appeared through the windows and it was doing something unexpected, minarets rising alongside orthodox church domes in a combination that shouldn't have worked as beautifully as it did, kremlin walls visible in the distance in a warm terracotta holding the thin November light.
"Oh," Michelle said quietly.
"Yes," Suzanne agreed.
They drove through streets that were busy in a way that felt nothing like New York busy. Purposeful but unhurried. Shop signs in Russian and Tatar script. A market down a side street. People moving with the ease of those who were exactly where they belonged.
Suzanne looked at all of it through the window and felt something in her chest that had been wound tight for two weeks begin, very slowly, to loosen.
Their hotel was in the city centre. High ceilings, warm lighting, the kind of quiet that expensive places cultivated deliberately. A young woman at the front desk checked them in and said something in Russian their phones translated as we hope you enjoy Kazan.
"We absolutely will," Michelle told her translation app and showed the screen to the woman who smiled with genuine amusement.
Their rooms were adjoining. Michelle appeared in the connecting doorway within four minutes, still in her coat, holding her phone.
"King David wants to know if we arrived safely." She paused. "And he sent you a voice note."
Suzanne looked up from her suitcase. "He sent me a voice note."
"He said, and I'm quoting, tell Suzanne I said welcome to Russia and that she should find somewhere good to eat because there's a Nigerian restaurant in Kazan that's apparently excellent and she'll feel better for it."
Suzanne stared at her. "There's a Nigerian restaurant in Kazan."
"Apparently." Michelle was grinning. "He researched it. For you. Before you arrived."
Something moved through Suzanne that she didn't immediately have a name for. She thought about what Michelle had said on the plane about the real kind of good, and she looked at her best friend's face, bright and certain and entirely in love in the way of someone who had found something they didn't know they were looking for, and felt glad. Simply and completely glad.
"Tell him thank you," she said. "Tell him I'll find it."
"Tell him yourself at some point," Michelle said, already typing. "He'd appreciate it."
Suzanne turned back to her suitcase. Outside the window Kazan moved through its afternoon with the unhurried confidence of a city that had been here a very long time.
She unpacked slowly. A deep rust wrap dress. Wide leg trousers in ivory. The structured blazer in forest green she'd made herself three months ago and hadn't yet worn anywhere significant. She touched the sleeve of it and looked out at the unfamiliar skyline.
New air, Michelle had said. New streets. New everything.
She breathed in slowly and felt, for the first time in two weeks, that she was somewhere her old life couldn't quite reach her.
It was a good feeling. She was going to let herself have it.
"Michelle," she called through the connecting door.
"Yes."
"Find the Nigerian restaurant."
A pause. Then Michelle laughing, bright and immediate and genuine, carrying through the wall like it belonged there.
"Already on it," she called back.
Suzanne smiled. She turned back to her unpacking and let Kazan be whatever it was going to be.