CHAPTER EIGHT
Suzanne
She almost cancelled.
She was standing in front of the mirror at ten minutes to eleven, dressed and ready, and she almost picked up her phone and sent a polite professionally worded message explaining that something had come up and she'd need to reschedule the meeting about Valentina's commission.
The problem was she couldn't identify a single convincing reason to cancel that didn't trace back, under honest examination, to the fact that Mikhail Volkov made her nervous in a way she didn't have a comfortable category for.
She was not a woman who got nervous. She'd stood in front of industry panels at Parsons and defended collections half the room had already decided to dismiss. She'd walked into meetings with buyers who hadn't bothered to learn her name and walked out with contracts. She'd built a company in a city that didn't care whether she succeeded and succeeded anyway.
She did not get nervous.
And yet.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Wide leg trousers in warm camel. Fitted black turtleneck tucked at the front. Low heeled ankle boots in cognac leather she'd made herself two seasons ago and that remained one of her favourite things she'd ever produced. Hair down and pressed smooth. Small gold hoops. She looked exactly like herself, which was the point. It was always the point. She dressed the way she did everything, intentionally, with full awareness of what she was communicating and to whom.
She picked up her bag and left before she could talk herself out of it.
He was waiting in the lobby of a small restaurant a ten minute walk from the hotel, standing when she arrived rather than seated, which she noticed immediately because it was the kind of detail that told you something about a person. Dark trousers. Grey shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He looked, if anything, more arresting in daylight than he had in the warm lighting of the gala the previous evening, which she considered slightly unfair.
His grey eyes found her the moment she walked through the door and something in his expression shifted, barely perceptible. The specific adjustment of a man receiving something he'd been waiting for and was attempting not to show that he'd been waiting for it.
She appreciated the attempt even if it didn't entirely succeed.
"Ms Paul," he said.
"Mr Volkov." She looked around briefly. Small and warm and clearly local, the kind of place that didn't advertise itself because it didn't need to. The smell alone was extraordinary, something slow cooked and deeply savoury with the faint sweetness of something baked underneath. "This isn't what I expected."
"What did you expect."
"Something larger. More formal."
He pulled out the chair across from him with the ease of someone for whom the gesture was entirely natural rather than performed. "Larger and more formal rarely produces good food."
She sat down and looked at him across the table. "Is that a principle you apply generally."
"To most things." He sat and the waiter appeared immediately, a young man who greeted Mikhail with the familiarity of someone who knew him and knew what he'd order. Mikhail spoke to him briefly in Russian, low and unhurried, then looked back at Suzanne. "I ordered for us both. If there's anything you can't eat tell me and I'll correct it."
"What did you order."
"Beshbarmak. Tatar dish, lamb and noodles in broth. Pelmeni to start, which are dumplings. And bread because the bread here is worth it." The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile but the closest she'd seen his face come to one. "If any of that is objectionable I'll order differently."
"None of that is objectionable. I like lamb."
"Good."
A brief silence settled between them. Not uncomfortable. More like the silence of two people who were both aware that the professional pretence that had brought them here had already dissolved and were deciding together, without discussing it, what came next.
"Valentina," Suzanne said.
Something warm moved across his face at the name. The first entirely unguarded expression she'd seen from him. It lasted only a moment before his face settled back into its usual composure but she caught it and filed it away. "She's my youngest sibling," he said. "She's been following your work for two years. The emerald piece from your New York show particularly."
"The closing piece."
"Yes."
"She has good taste."
"She does." Quiet pride. Clearly genuine. "She'd like something for an event in the spring. Something entirely hers, not something that already exists. She's particular about that."
"As she should be." Suzanne reached into her bag and produced the small notebook she carried everywhere, cream covered with a pen clipped to the spine. Clean page. "Tell me about her. Not the commission. Her. What she's like. How she moves through a room. What she reaches for when she gets dressed in the morning."
He looked at her for a moment with an expression that was interested in a way that went slightly beyond the conversation. "Most designers ask for measurements first."
"Measurements tell me the body. I already know how to dress a body. I need to know the person inside it." She looked at him steadily. "Tell me about your sister."
Something settled in his expression. The look of a man who hadn't expected to be impressed this morning and was finding that he was. He leaned back slightly and considered the question with the same seriousness she'd given it.
"She's twenty four," he said. "She walks into rooms like she owns them without appearing to notice that she does. Elegant but not delicate. Strong opinions and the confidence to hold them in company that disagrees." A pause. "She'd wear something other people wouldn't dare to and carry it like it was the obvious choice."
Suzanne was writing. "Colour."
"Deep colours. Jewel tones. She wore sapphire to an event last year and the photographs were extraordinary."
"Silhouette."
"Structured. She doesn't like things that are vague in their shape."
"Fabric."
He thought about it. "Something with weight. She's not a chiffon person."
Suzanne almost smiled. "No. Some people aren't chiffon people and it's important to know early." She made a note. "I can work with this. I'll need her measurements and a conversation with her directly before I finalise anything."
"That can be arranged."
The pelmeni arrived and the conversation shifted the way food shifts conversations. A slight softening when something good is placed in front of people and they respond to it honestly. The dumplings were small and precisely made, the dipping sauce something sour and creamy that Suzanne tried and then tried again immediately.
"This is excellent," she said.
"Yes." He was watching her face when she said it, something attentive and quiet in his expression. When he noticed her noticing he looked down at his own plate. "The restaurant has been here forty years. Same family."
"You can taste it. Food made by people who care about it tastes different from food made correctly but without feeling."
He looked up. "That's an interesting distinction."
"It's an obvious one."
"Most people don't make it."
"Most people aren't paying attention."
Something crossed his face she didn't have a name for. Gone before she could examine it properly.
They talked through the pelmeni and into the beshbarmak, which arrived in a wide shallow bowl. Lamb tender enough to require no effort. Noodles broad and soft in rich broth, fragrant with something herbal and warm. Suzanne ate with the uncomplicated appetite she had when food deserved it and didn't perform restraint because restraint in the face of genuinely good food had always seemed like an unnecessary form of dishonesty.
He told her things about Kazan that weren't in any guide. The street where his grandmother had lived. A market that only operated Thursday mornings. The particular quality of the light on the Kazanka river in early winter that was unlike anything else he'd seen anywhere in the world. He spoke about his city the way people speak about places they love when they're not performing the loving, simply and specifically, with the details that only belonging somewhere produces.
She listened and asked questions and watched his face as he talked and noticed that it did something when he spoke about Kazan that it didn't do in other moments. Something that opened slightly. A warmth that lived underneath the cold precision he wore everywhere else.
"You miss it," she said. "When you're in Moscow."
"Yes."
"But you stay in Moscow."
"Moscow is where the work is."
"And the work comes first."
He held her gaze for a moment. "It has," he said carefully, "for a long time."
She noted the past tense. Didn't comment on it.
"What about you," he said. "Nigeria."
"Lagos." She broke a piece of bread, exactly as good as he'd promised, dense and slightly soured and warm from the oven. "Surulere. Not wealthy, not poor. Just real. My mother still lives there."
"You left at eighteen."
"Scholarship to Parsons." She said it simply and without false modesty because it had been an achievement and she'd learned not to diminish her achievements for the comfort of rooms that found them inconvenient. "I didn't go back for two years after I arrived. Couldn't afford the flights and was too proud to say so."
Something moved across his face. Careful and attentive. "That must have been difficult."
"It was." She looked at the bread in her hand. "It was also clarifying. When you can't go back you find out quickly what you're actually made of." She looked up at him. "I found out I was made of quite a lot."
"Yes," he said quietly. "You were."
The words landed differently than she expected. Not like a compliment, which could be deflected. More like a statement of fact from someone who had considered the evidence and arrived at a conclusion. Something about that certainty, the absence of any performance in it, moved through her in a way she felt before she could manage it.
She looked at her bowl.
They finished eating and the waiter brought tea, a Russian blend served in glasses with small handles, dark and slightly smoky. Suzanne wrapped both hands around hers because the afternoon had turned cold outside and the warmth was pleasant against her palms.
"I want to show you something," Mikhail said. Directly and without preamble but with something underneath it that was different from his earlier register. Something that had lost a layer of its careful management. "If you're not needed elsewhere."
She looked at him. His expression was composed but his hands on the table were very still in the way that suggested the stillness was deliberate.
"What is it."
"The river. The light I told you about." He held her gaze. "It's better seen than described."
She should have said she had things to do. Emails. A supplier in Milan she'd been meaning to call. A perfectly reasonable afternoon that could be spent productively in ways that did not involve walking along a river in November with a man she'd met seventeen hours ago and was already finding deeply inconvenient to her peace of mind.
"Alright," she said.
He was right about the light.
It was doing something in the late afternoon she didn't have adequate language for. The low winter sun hitting the water at an angle that turned it the colour of old bronze, the far bank dark against it, the city reflected in pieces that shifted with the current. She stood at the railing above the water and looked at it for a long time without speaking.
He stood beside her. Close enough that she was aware of the warmth of him against the cold air. Neither of them spoke and the silence was the comfortable kind, the kind that doesn't require filling.
"It's beautiful," she said finally.
"Yes," he said.
He was not looking at the river.
She turned her head and found him already looking at her and for a moment neither of them moved. The cold air moved between them and the river went on doing its extraordinary thing with the light below and something that had been building since the previous evening in the warm noise of the gala pressed forward with the patient insistence of something that had decided it was done waiting.
Then a strand of hair lifted across her face in the wind and before she registered that he was moving his hand came up and he tucked it back, his fingers brushing the curve of her cheek as they drew away.
The touch lasted less than two seconds.
The absence of it lasted considerably longer.
Neither of them spoke.
She looked back at the river. Very aware of her own heartbeat in a way she hadn't been moments before. Beside her he'd gone very still in the way she was beginning to understand meant something was happening in him that he wasn't going to name out loud.
She wasn't going to name it either.
But she felt it. Warm and inconvenient and entirely real, pressing against the inside of her chest with the quiet persistence of something that had decided, without consulting her, to stay.
They walked back as the light gave out and the city moved into its evening colours and she laughed at something he said about a particularly unsuccessful business dinner in Tokyo and the sound of her own laugh surprised her slightly. Genuine and unguarded in a way she hadn't been in weeks.
He walked her to the hotel entrance and they stood facing each other on the pavement, warm light from the lobby behind her and the cold Kazan evening around them.
"Dinner," he said. "Tomorrow evening."
Not quite a question. She noticed that and decided she didn't mind it.
"That depends," she said.
"On what."
"On whether you're going to spend the evening telling me things about Kazan that aren't in any guidebook." She looked at him steadily. "I found that considerably more interesting than I expected to."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. The almost smile, closer this time than it had been before. "I can do that."
"Then yes," she said. "Dinner tomorrow."
She turned and went inside and did not look back and was very deliberate about not looking back and went directly to the elevator and pressed the button for her floor and stood in the mirrored panel and looked at her own reflection.
Her expression was doing something she recognised. She hadn't seen it in a while.
She decided, for tonight, not to do anything with it at all.
She went to her room and sat on the edge of the bed and picked up her phone and did not call Michelle because some things needed to be held privately for a little while before they were spoken out loud and this was one of those things.
She set the phone down.
Outside the window Kazan had gone fully dark and the city lights were doing what city lights do at night. Making the darkness beautiful rather than empty. She sat in her quiet room and felt, underneath the caution and the careful management and the very sensible reasons she had for keeping her walls exactly where they were, something warm and stubborn and inconveniently alive.
She was going to have to pay attention to that.
She was not entirely sure she minded.