She told Maya on the phone, the following morning, before she told anyone else.
This was not a calculated decision — she did not rank the people in her life by importance and work through them in order. It was simply that when she woke up in the Russian morning with the ring on her finger and the fire long dead in the library and Dimitri still asleep, the first thing she reached for was her phone and the first name in her mind was Maya. This was, she supposed, its own kind of information about what Maya was.
She went to the window with her tea. Outside the estate grounds were grey and white, frost on the grass, the forest dark at its edge. The sky was doing the low, flat, considered thing that Russian November skies did, as though deciding whether to snow.
She called Maya.
It rang twice. Then Maya's voice, slightly alert in the way of a person who answered early calls from Jane with a specific quality of readiness — they had history, the two of them, with early calls that meant things.
"He proposed," Jane said.
A silence.
A particular silence — Jane had known Maya for seven years and had become fluent in her silences, the way you become fluent in anything you encounter consistently and pay attention to. This one was the silence of someone receiving information that was large and needing a moment to establish its dimensions.
"He didn't propose," Jane corrected herself, because precision mattered, especially with Maya, who noticed when you got things approximately right and cared about the difference between approximately and exactly. "He said he wanted to marry me. It was more of a — declaration with a question inside it. Very him."
Another silence, longer.
"Maya?"
"I'm processing," Maya said. "Give me a moment."
Jane waited. She looked at the frost on the grass and the dark line of the forest and turned the ring on her finger once, which she had been doing since last night without quite noticing, the small habit of something new.
"Okay," Maya said. "I've processed." A beat, and then something shifted in her voice — she was no longer the person who received information, she was the person who had been present for the whole of it, all four years, all the years before that. "Jane Williams. I have known you for seven years. I was there when you showed up to that gala in my dress — my dress, Jane, which you borrowed without asking and which you still haven't properly apologised for — and came home unable to stop talking about a man you'd spent the entire evening refusing to look at directly."
"I looked at him."
"You looked at the middle distance near him and called it looking at him. I was there." Another beat. "I have watched you be kidnapped and returned and fall in love with the kidnapper — and I want to note, for the record, that I handled the kidnapping situation with remarkable composure given what it was — and build something real out of it, something I would not have predicted and am still somewhat astonished by. And now—"
"Maya."
"I'm getting there." Her voice changed slightly. The register of it, the particular quality that Jane recognised as Maya arriving at the thing underneath the thing. "And now you're — you said yes."
"Yes."
"To marrying Dimitri Volkov."
"That's the person, yes."
A sound came down the phone that Jane needed a moment to identify, because it was so outside the ordinary range of Maya's behaviour that her brain initially miscategorised it. Then she recognised it. Maya was crying.
Jane sat up straighter. In seven years she had seen Maya cry twice, and both times had involved circumstances significantly more extreme than the present one. "Maya. Are you—"
"I'm happy," Maya said, slightly muffled in the way of a person holding the phone away from their face. "Don't be alarmed. I'm just—" She took a breath, the controlled breath of someone who had decided to be composed and was executing the decision. "Jane. You're so happy. You're so genuinely—" She stopped. Another breath. "You deserve this. You always have. Even in the years when you didn't know you did — you always did."
Jane pressed her hand over her eyes for a moment.
She thought about the years when she hadn't known she did. The years before the gala, before the blue dress, before any of this — the years in which she had been entirely herself and entirely fine and had not known that fine was not the same as this. She thought about Maya across all of those years, the specific and irreplaceable quality of a friendship that had been present through all of it, that had been there on the morning after the gala and in the difficult middle of the second year and at every point between.
"Thank you," she said, which was not sufficient and was what she had.
"Don't thank me," Maya said, recovering herself. "Tell me everything. Start from the beginning. Where were you? What did he say exactly? What's the ring like?"
"We were in the library. He looked up from his book and said he wanted to marry me. No knee, no speech, no—"
"Of course no knee. That would have been wrong for him."
"It would have been wrong," Jane agreed. "The ring was his mother's. A single dark stone."
A pause. "Oh," Maya said, with the specific quality of someone understanding the full weight of something. "Jane."
"I know."
"That's—"
"I know."
They were quiet for a moment together, the particular quiet of two people who understood each other well enough to not need to finish certain sentences.
"Come to London," Jane said. "Come this weekend. I'll cook."
"You'll cook badly," Maya said immediately, which meant she was back to herself, the crisis of feeling successfully navigated.
"He'll cook and I'll supervise," Jane corrected. "And we'll open the expensive wine. The one he's been keeping for something."
"What's it for?"
"He didn't say. But I think this qualifies."
"I'll be there Friday," Maya said. The warmth in her voice was undisguised now, no longer managed, simply there. "Don't you dare open it without me."
"Friday," Jane confirmed.
After she rang off she stayed at the window for a while longer with the cooling tea and the frost on the grass and the ring on her finger that had been his mother's. She thought about the roof in July and the stars and what he had said about the stories his mother had told him, and she thought about the ring on her finger and what it meant that he had put it there, and she felt the weight of it — not heavily, not as a burden, but as the specific gravity of things that matter.
Outside the sky made its decision.
It began, softly and without fuss, to snow.