CHAPTER TEN
Suzanne
She didn't tell Michelle about the dinners.
Not the first one and not the four that followed it across the remaining days in Kazan, each one running longer than the one before, each one ending at the hotel entrance with the particular charged quality of two people aware of something neither of them had named yet and had silently agreed, for now, to leave unnamed.
She didn't tell Michelle because Michelle would have had opinions and the opinions would have been loud and enthusiastic and completely reasonable and Suzanne was not ready for reasonable. She was still in the part where she was carrying it quietly and turning it over in her hands and looking at it from different angles in the privacy of her own mind.
She told herself this was sensible. She was probably right.
What she couldn't have explained, if asked, was the specific quality of those two weeks. Nothing dramatic happened. They ate and they walked and they talked in the way she hadn't talked to anyone in a long time, honestly and without the particular performance that public life eventually demanded of everyone who lived inside it. He showed her things about Kazan she wouldn't have found alone. A bookshop down a side street whose owner kept the best things behind the counter and only produced them for people he trusted. A bakery that opened at five in the morning and sold one specific pastry that was gone by six thirty and that Mikhail had once, he told her with the flat delivery of someone recounting a minor tragedy, arrived at six thirty one for. A stretch of the river at a different hour where the light did something entirely different from what it had done the first time he showed it to her.
He was teaching her his city. She understood that. She let herself be taught.
And he listened to her. That was the thing she kept returning to in the quiet of her hotel room after each evening. He listened the way people listen when they're actually interested rather than waiting for their turn. He asked questions that suggested he'd heard not just what she said but what she meant. She wasn't accustomed to that from men who looked like him and moved through the world the way he did and she didn't entirely know what to do with it except to keep showing up for dinner.
On their last evening she wore the forest green blazer she'd made herself and not yet worn anywhere significant. She stood in front of the mirror before leaving and acknowledged, privately and without drama, that she'd chosen it on purpose.
He noticed. She saw him notice when she walked toward him outside the restaurant, the way his eyes moved over the blazer with the particular attention of someone who understood clothes, which surprised her.
"You made that," he said. Not a question.
She looked at him. "How do you know."
"The finishing at the lapel. No one does that by hand anymore."
She stared at him. "You know about finishing."
"I know about things that are made with care," he said simply, and held the door open, and she walked past him into the warm restaurant interior and decided that statement was going to require some private examination later.
That last dinner was the best one. They'd stopped performing casualness by then and had arrived at something simply comfortable, the ease of two people who had covered enough ground together that the early carefulness had worn away and left something more honest underneath. She told him about the year after she left the label. The months of building Zee Clothing Line from nothing. The specific fear of the first collection, whether anyone would come, whether anyone would care, whether she'd made a catastrophic mistake giving up the safety of a salary for the terrifying freedom of her own name on the door.
"Were you afraid," he asked.
"Constantly. Every single day for the first two years."
"But you kept going."
"Of course I kept going." She looked at him. "Being afraid was never a reason to stop. It was just something to carry while I worked."
He looked at her across the table with the particular quality of attention he gave things that mattered to him and said nothing for a moment.
"What," she said.
"Nothing." He picked up his glass. "You're remarkable is all."
The word landed the same way it had the first evening. Not like a compliment but like a conclusion. She felt it in the same place she always felt the things he said that he meant completely, somewhere below her sternum, warm and slightly destabilising.
She looked at her plate. "You say that like you know me."
"I'm beginning to," he said.
She looked up. He was looking at her with those grey eyes that gave everything and nothing simultaneously and the candlelight between them was doing something warm to the angles of his face and she held his gaze and felt, with the particular clarity of someone who has been trying not to know something and has finally run out of room not to know it, that she was in trouble.
Good trouble, possibly. But trouble nonetheless.
They walked back slowly that night, slower than usual, both of them aware without discussing it that this was the last evening and that something was going to have to be decided about what that meant. The cold had deepened into the kind that made their breath visible and she had her hands in her coat pockets and he was walking close enough that their arms touched at the shoulder every few steps.
At the hotel entrance they stopped and faced each other and it was there again, the thing that had been there at the river when he tucked her hair back, pressing forward with its patient insistence.
She looked at him. He looked at her. The moment stretched and she thought very clearly this is the part where something happens and then his phone rang.
He looked at it. Something crossed his face. "Ivan. I have to—"
"Go," she said. Easily. Because whatever this was it was patient enough to wait. Because she was going home tomorrow and they both knew it and neither of them had said what that meant.
He looked at her for one more moment with an expression she was going to think about on the plane. Then he said goodnight Suzanne in that deep unhurried voice and turned and put the phone to his ear and walked away and she stood at the hotel entrance and watched him go.
Then she went inside.
She slept well that night which surprised her. She'd expected to lie awake turning things over. Instead she fell asleep quickly and deeply and woke to her alarm feeling rested and clear in the way of someone who has made a decision without quite knowing when they made it.
She packed carefully the way she always packed, everything folded and placed with intention. She wrapped the forest green blazer in the tissue paper she travelled with and placed it on top.
Michelle knocked on the connecting door at eight. Camel coat. Red hair in a ponytail. Carry-on already behind her.
"Ready?"
"Almost." Suzanne zipped the suitcase. "Did you have a good two weeks."
Michelle's face did the thing it did for one specific reason. "Yes," she said simply and completely. "Did you."
Suzanne looked at her suitcase for a moment. "Yes. I did."
Michelle looked at her with the particular attention of a best friend who has noticed something and is choosing her moment. Then she picked up Suzanne's carry-on without being asked and said "car is downstairs" and that was that.
On the flight back Suzanne slept for four hours and spent the remaining time looking out the window thinking about grey eyes and a voice she could still hear if she was quiet enough and a man who knew about hand-finishing on lapels and had his grandmother's restaurant and could not make toast.
She landed at JFK on a Tuesday afternoon, took a car to Fort Greene, walked into her apartment, set her bags down and stood in the middle of her living room. The particular quality of her own space after two weeks away. Familiar and slightly foreign simultaneously, the way home always feels after you've been somewhere that changed you even a small amount.
Forty seven notifications. She dealt with the professional ones and left the personal ones and made herself tea and sat on the couch and waited.
He would call. She was fairly certain.
Certain enough that she didn't check her phone every hour. She checked it every two hours which she considered reasonable given the circumstances.
By Thursday she was checking it every hour.
By the following Monday, eight days after she'd walked through her front door feeling changed, she wasn't checking it at all.
She sat at her desk in the studio that Monday morning with her second coffee of the day and looked at the fabric she'd been cutting and put the scissors down and sat with it for a moment.
She'd been here before. Not exactly here, not with this specific person, but in the general territory of waiting for something that wasn't coming. She knew this territory. She knew its particular quality of silence.
She picked up her scissors.
She was not going to sit in this feeling. She was going to do what she always did when the ground shifted. Work. Build something. Take whatever this was and turn it into fuel because that was what she knew how to do and she was very good at it.
She cut the fabric. Cleanly and precisely and with the complete focus of a woman who had decided something.
St Petersburg was in six weeks. She had a show to prepare. A brand to build. Forty seven emails and a supplier in Milan and three new designs that needed to be finished before the end of the month.
She had more than enough.
She worked until eight that evening and went home and made herself rice and stew and ate it standing at the kitchen counter, a habit her mother had spent years trying to correct and that she'd never managed to break, and she did not look at her phone while she ate.
She looked at it after.
Nothing.
She washed her bowl and dried it and put it away and went to bed and lay in the dark and felt, underneath the resolve and the work and the perfectly reasonable decision to move on, something that was quietly and stubbornly not finished.
She closed her eyes.
She would be fine. She was always fine. She had a gift for fine.
She just needed a moment to remember how.