Chapter 4: Still Hoping

Amber’s POV

Nikolai was already gone by the time I woke up.

I found that out the way I found out most things in that house, by walking through it alone and noticing what was missing rather than being told anything directly. His side of the bed, which I hadn’t actually shared with him, had been left untouched the night before, since he’d shown me to a room of my own without much explanation beyond the fact that it was mine now. The house was silent in a way that felt less like peace and more like waiting, like it was holding its breath for someone to fill it with noise it wasn’t sure it wanted.

I sat at the kitchen table for a long time that morning doing nothing at all, just turning the ring on my finger and looking at the contract still sitting where I’d left it the night before, and I thought, not for the first time, that I had spent most of my life waiting for someone to tell me what version of myself I was supposed to be that day.

That was the part I never let myself examine too closely. Not the mutism itself, not really, because by now the silence had become so worn into me that some days I genuinely forgot it wasn’t just who I was. It was the reason underneath it that I avoided looking at directly. My mother had told me to disappear that day in the hospital hallway, and some small, stubborn part of me had gone along with it not just out of fear, but because some part of me had wanted, desperately, for her to finally be proud of me for doing something right. I had spent my whole life doing whatever she asked, however strange, however costly, because obedience was the only currency I’d ever figured out how to trade for something that felt close enough to love.

She showed up a little after ten, letting herself in with a spare key I hadn’t known she had, and I understood within about thirty seconds of her sitting down across from me that this wasn’t a visit about how I was doing.

“You look tired,” she said, which from her wasn’t concern, just an observation on my presentation. “You should sleep more. Men like him notice things like that.”

I didn’t sign anything back yet. I just watched her, waiting for whatever this was actually about.

“I’m only here to remind you of a few things,” she continued, folding her hands on the table the way she did when she was about to deliver instructions dressed up as advice. “You obey him. Whatever he asks, however he asks it. You don’t argue, you don’t question him in front of his people, and you certainly don’t do whatever it is you did to make him agree to any of this in the first place.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, like she still hadn’t fully worked out how a man like Nikolai Volkov had ended up marrying the daughter nobody had planned for him to marry. “Whatever you did right, keep doing it. This family cannot afford for you to ruin what your sister already ruined by running.”

I wanted, for one full second, to sign something sharp back at her. Something about how Isabel hadn’t ruined anything by leaving, how maybe she’d just been the only one of us brave enough to walk away from a life neither of us had chosen. But the old habit was faster than the anger, and my hands stayed still in my lap, and I nodded instead, because some part of me, the same part that had learned to disappear at nine years old, still wanted her to leave this house believing I was good. Believing I had finally done something worth her approval.

She left not long after that, without asking me a single question about how I felt, about whether I was scared, about anything that wasn’t a logistics update on how I was supposed to perform being someone’s wife. I sat with that for a while after she’d gone, the particular hollow feeling I always got after her visits, the one that told me some part of me kept hoping each time would be different and kept being wrong.

I decided, somewhere in the afternoon, that I would make dinner.

I told myself it wasn’t about earning anything. I told myself it was just something to do with my hands in a house that didn’t feel like mine yet, in a life that didn’t feel like mine yet either. But if I was being honest with myself, and I usually tried to be, at least internally, there was a small and familiar voice underneath the decision that sounded a lot like hope. Maybe if I did this right, if the table looked nice and the food was good and I looked like the kind of wife worth coming home to, something in him would soften. Some acknowledgment. Some version of the flicker I’d seen at the wedding, the one that told me he’d noticed my hands moving even when nobody else in the room could read them.

I recognized the shape of that hope. I recognized it immediately, actually, the way you recognize an old scar you’ve stopped consciously feeling but never really stopped carrying. It was the same hope I’d carried into every conversation with my mother since I was nine years old, the quiet belief that if I just did enough, obeyed enough, disappeared correctly enough, someone would finally look at me and decide I was worth loving out loud.

I noticed it, and then I pushed it back down, the way I always did, and I kept cooking.

I changed before he got home. Nothing dramatic, just something that felt deliberate instead of accidental, hair down instead of pulled back, and I set the table the way I imagined a home was supposed to look, and then I waited.

He came home late. Later than I expected, and by the time I heard the door I’d already eaten half my portion alone, the rest of it going quietly cold across from an empty chair. He walked into the kitchen still in his suit, tie loosened, exhaustion sitting differently on him than it had that morning, and his eyes moved over the table, over the food, over me, for exactly as long as it took him to register that it existed.

He didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t say anything at all, actually, just gave a small nod that might have been acknowledgment or might have been nothing, and then he walked past me toward the hallway that led to his side of the house, and I heard his door close a few moments later, firm and final.

I sat there for a while after that, not moving, listening to a silence that felt very different from the one I chose for myself every day. This one wasn’t mine. This one had just been handed to me by someone else, and I didn’t know what to do with the size of it.

I don’t remember deciding to fall asleep at that table. I just remember waking up sometime later with a stiff neck and a cold room and the particular disorientation of not knowing how long I’d been out, and the first thing I understood, before I even understood anything else, was that he hadn’t come to wake me. He hadn’t come to check if I was even still in the kitchen. He’d gone to his room and closed his door and let me sleep sitting upright at a table I’d set for two, and some part of me that I recognized immediately, the same part that used to wait by the door for my mother to notice I’d cleaned my room without being asked, folded in on itself very quietly.

I pulled the plate toward me and scraped the cold food into the trash, and I didn’t let myself examine why my hands were shaking slightly while I did it. Then I walked to my own room, down the opposite hallway from his, and closed my door the same way he had closed his, firm and final, and I told myself that was fine. I told myself I hadn’t actually expected anything different.

I almost believed it.