“Rosa Pavlovna,” he said, “will you marry me? For real this time?”

“You’ll stand on my right,” he said as the car pulled away. “You’ll smile when I touch your elbow. You’ll not speak to anyone for longer than three minutes. If someone asks how we met, you’ll say ‘through mutual acquaintances’ and then excuse yourself to the restroom.”

Rosa felt her elbow touched. Dmitri had appeared beside her, silent as a draft.

He took a breath. Then, for the first time in four years, Dmitri Sergeyevich Volkov did something he had not done since Elena died.

—D

At one point, a woman in a feathered headpiece cornered her near a painting of a drowned horse.

She signed the new contract with her grandmother’s fountain pen. And on the margin, in her own handwriting, she added one final line:

Dmitri Volkov was not what she expected. She had braced herself for a oligarch’s nephew—gold watches, cold eyes, a man who spoke in boardroom percentages. Instead, the man who met her at the civil registry office had the hollowed-out look of someone who hadn’t slept in a decade. His suit was expensive but creased, as if he’d slept in it. His left hand, when he shook hers, was missing the ring finger.

Rosa tucked the photograph into her coat pocket, next to her heart. Then she locked up the shop for the last time and walked home, where a man with a missing finger was waiting with two mismatched mugs of tea.

Dmitri was waiting for her in the east wing kitchen. He had made tea. Two mismatched mugs. One sugar, stirred counterclockwise.

She set down her tea. She walked to him, knelt in front of him, and pressed her mended-yellow-sweater sleeve against his cheek.

Inside was not a letter. It was a contract.

Inside was a photograph. A woman in a yellow sweater, smiling like she knew a secret. And beneath it, a note in a cramped, doctor’s scrawl:

Rosa read it three times. Then she signed.