Grant Escapes a Burning Ford as Paul and Tatiana’s Relationship Deepens
Grant, fleeing along a closed road, forces his Ford off the track and into the woods, scraping past rocks and trees until the vehicle is hidden from anyone on the road. The car’s steering then goes loose, the brake warning light comes on, and as he descends a steep slope the Ford loses control and flips forward. He is left hanging upside down in his seat belt, crawls out through a shattered windshield, grabs the black gym bag he had left behind, and runs as smoke and flames engulf the wreck. About 100 meters away, the Ford explodes in a huge orange fireball.
The second section then jumps back six years to how Paul Brightman met Tatiana Belkin at a charity gala for liver cancer, where his employer, Aquina Properties, had bought a table. Paul, a senior information analyst, first thought she was catering staff, but she was actually a guest wearing a Nili Lotan shirt. They discovered she was from Russia, had come to the United States at about age six, and that Paul knew some Russian from college. She invited him out that same night, and over drinks he learned she was a photographer living in the East Village.
Paul later found no online trace of Tatiana, which only increased her mystery. After a second date at a Viking themed bar called Expert, where she beat him at axe throwing, they talked about families, work and photography. Paul described his difficult childhood, his mother’s death from cancer, and his father Stanley Brightman, a brilliant but unstable man who retreated to the woods in Washington state, following anti technology and survivalist ideas. Tatiana, in turn, said her family held Sunday dinners every week, that she had an older brother, and that her photographs focus on ordinary people, especially those others ignore.
Their relationship turned physical at her East Village apartment, where she lived with a rescued dog named Pushkin and displayed portraits of Russian women, mostly elderly babushkas. Tatiana explained that she tries to photograph with empathy, asking permission and building trust. Paul also visited his incapacitated uncle Thomas in a nursing home, remembering that Thomas had taken him in after his mother died and his father expelled him from home. Later, Paul told his friend Rick Jacobson about Tatiana, while at work he was vindicated for pushing Aquina to dump Cavalier shares before Bloomberg exposed the company’s CEO and the stock collapsed. At the end of the excerpt, Tatiana and Paul go out for Persian food in Brooklyn, where she says she needs a sensible, grounded partner and notes that in the “madness Olympics” she usually wins.
