A nurse says, “Sir, you have to let go now.”
He doesn’t. Not immediately.
He bends so close his lips brush my ear, and I hear the words in the place between fear and darkness where they will stay forever.
“I love you,” he says. “And I love our child. You hear me?”
A sob catches in my throat. I nod the best I can.
Only then does he let them take me.
The last thing I see before the doors swing shut is his face.
And the last thing I hear is his voice, raw and shaking and full of me.
“I love you.”
37
ALEKSEI
I just foundout that I’m going to have a son.
I’m standing outside the surgical doors with my hands covered in the phantom memory of hers, and that is the first clear thought I can form:
A son. I never asked. Not once.
Not because I didn’t want to know. Because I thought asking would be too much. Too intimate. Too presumptuous for a man she had every reason to mistrust. So, I never asked whether the baby was a boy or a girl. I never asked what names she liked. I never asked when the first kick happened or whether she was sick in the mornings or if she ever lay awake at night with one hand over her stomach and thought about the future.
I told myself restraint was respect. Now it feels like cowardice.
Because she had to tell me the truth on a gurney, crying, thinking she was about to die.
Our child. My son. And she is in there.
That thought keeps circling back and hitting the same place in my chest like a hammer.
She is in there.
The doors closed on her and I told her I loved her too late, and now I am standing in a white corridor full of fluorescent light and stale coffee and pretending I am not one sentence away from tearing the building apart with my bare hands.
No one comes too close.
Not the nurses. Not the security at the far end of the hall. Not even my own men, though Sergei has arrived and taken up position by the window like he knows better than to speak unless I ask.
Good. If anyone offers me comfort, I may put them through the wall.
The first hour is the worst.
Because it is still recent enough that my body expects her voice around the next corner. Still fresh enough that I can hear her sayingour babyin my ear and feel the way her fingers clutched mine like if she let go, she’d disappear.
I sit once. Stand again thirty seconds later.
I walk the corridor. Stop. Go back to the same place in front of the doors as if my being there matters to the outcome.
My mother is brought down in a wheelchair against my explicit instructions, pale and furious at being managed. One look at my face and she says nothing foolish likeit will be alright. She just reaches for my hand once.
“A boy,” I say. “My kid. And I almost lost him before I had him.”
