Sandpiper Point

The house is white stone and glass, and it looks like it was built to keep the Atlantic out.

Inside it's quiet in the way of very expensive places: thick rugs, high ceilings, a staircase that curves up like a held breath. A woman waits at the bottom of it. Early thirties, a long dark braid, black trousers and a gray sweater, a face that would be pretty if it ever relaxed.

"Inessa Kolar," Dmitri says. "She'll be with you when you leave the house."

"A bodyguard," you say.

"Driver, shadow, nuisance." Inessa's voice is flat Midwestern American, not Brighton at all. "Mostly nuisance. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Belova."

"Please don't call me that."

The corner of her mouth twitches. "Noted."

Dmitri walks you up himself. At the end of a long hallway he stops at a door, opens it, and stays in the hall.

The room is bigger than your whole apartment in Bay Ridge. Pale blue walls, a bed like a cloud, windows looking out over a lawn that slopes down to the water and a long wooden dock silvered by the moon. Someone has hung clothes in the closet in your size. Someone has put a jar of the honey cookies from the Lebedev bakery on Coney Island Avenue on the nightstand, the ones you've loved since you were six.

"How did you..."

"Your father." He holds out a brass key on a red ribbon. "The only one. My room is at the other end of the hall. If you need anything, call. If you don't, I won't bother you."

You take the key. It's warm from his pocket.

"Goodnight, Ava."

He's gone before you can say it back.

You lock the door. You sit on the edge of the cloud bed in your jeans, and you text Nika again, and it doesn't deliver. You look at the phone he gave you, with its single number. You put it under your pillow, and you don't sleep.

At two in the morning you give up.

The house is dark. You pad downstairs barefoot, through a kitchen as big as a restaurant's, out a glass door onto the lawn. The grass is cold and wet. The air smells of salt and cut hedges, and the water of the Sound is moving under the moon.

At the very end of the dock, a man is sitting with his back to the house.

You almost turn around. Then he says, without looking, "You can come out. I don't bite."

You walk the length of the dock. He's in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, no jacket, no tie, his forearms on his knees, a glass of something amber untouched beside him. Without the suit he looks younger. Not softer. Just younger.

You sit, a careful three feet away, and let your feet hang over the black water.

"Can't sleep?" he asks.

"I married a stranger today."

"So did I."

You laugh, a short, shocked sound. He doesn't smile, but something near his eyes does.

"Why didn't you stop it?" you ask. "When you lifted the veil. You could have. Everyone expected you to."

He's quiet so long you think he won't answer.

"Your father would have lost everything in that room," he says finally. "In front of everyone he's known for forty years. And you'd have walked out of there carrying it. I didn't want that."

"You don't even know me."

"I know you stood next to your sister at the engagement dinner and corrected the waiter's Russian so gently he thanked you." He turns his head. "I know you walked down an aisle you didn't choose with your chin up. That's enough to be going on with."

Your face goes hot. You hadn't known he'd noticed you at all.

"I want to be clear about something," he says. "I don't want anything from you that you don't offer. Not tonight. Not ever. If that changes for you, you'll tell me. If it doesn't, nothing changes for me."

The water slaps softly against the pilings. Far across the Sound, the lights of Connecticut blink.

"That's a very strange thing for a husband to say."

"I'm a very strange husband." He picks up the glass, looks at it, sets it down. "Go to sleep, Ava. You've got a car to try out tomorrow."

The car is dark green, small and fast, and the registration in the glove box has your name on it. Your actual name. Not Belova.

You drive it to Brooklyn on Sunday with Inessa's gray sedan staying exactly four car-lengths behind the whole way, and it's ridiculous how free you feel with your hands on the wheel.

The Firebird is closed, chairs stacked on tables, the roses from yesterday already drooping. Your father is in his office again, and he hugs you, and he asks if you ate, and he talks about the band and the champagne and the cake, and he never once looks you in the eye.

"Papa. Has she called?"

"No." He shuffles papers that don't need shuffling. "She'll call. She's dramatic, your sister, she'll call when she's embarrassed enough."

"You're not worried?"

"Of course I'm worried." Too fast. Too loud. "Go see your friend. Go. Live your life. You did enough."

You leave feeling like he's hiding something, and that you're too tired to dig.

Dalia meets you on the boardwalk with two iced coffees and her sunglasses pushed up in her hair. Dalia Truong interprets Vietnamese two courtrooms down from yours, and she's the only person you texted from the bridal suite yesterday: I'm doing something insane. Don't call.

"So," she says, handing you a coffee. "Are you okay, or is this a blink-twice situation?"

"I'm okay."

"Is he as hot as the internet says?"

"Dalia."

"I'm asking for legal reasons."

You end up laughing so hard you have to sit down on a bench, and then you end up crying, and she holds you without saying anything while the gulls scream and the ocean rolls in gray and slow.

Afterward, you go up to Nika's apartment above the club to get her things.

It's exactly as she left it. The made bed. The coffee cup, now cold, still on the sill. You open her dresser for her pajamas and her favorite sweater, and you open the top drawer for her phone charger, and you stop.

Her passport is there.

Burgundy cover, tucked under a pile of hair ties, right where she always keeps it. You open it. Nika smiles out at you, twenty-two, with bangs she later regretted.

You stand there a long time with it in your hand.

Nika has wanted to see Paris since she was nine. When she's upset, she threatens to move to Montreal. Every daydream she's ever had involves an airport.

Runaways take their passports.

You get back to Sandpiper Point after midnight. Inessa peels off at the gatehouse with a little salute. The house is dark except for one window at the far end of the second floor.

You climb the stairs, unlock your room, and step inside, and your phone lights up on the bed.

Not your phone. His. The one with only one number in it.

You're home. Good. Lock the door. Text me goodnight.