I BECAME HIS GREATEST REGRET

Chapter 2

Yelena POV

The hospital room was cold and white and smelled like the particular antiseptic that I would never be able to smell again without thinking of this exact ceiling.

I had been lying in the narrow bed for just over two hours. The doctor had said emotional distress. Had said elevated cortisol and please rest and handed me a leaflet about counselling services that I folded in half and slid under the pillow because I couldn’t look at it.

Bastien had dropped me off that morning.

He had pulled up to the entrance with the engine still running. He had squeezed my hand once — quick, firm, the kind of squeeze that means I’ve done my part — and said he had a meeting he couldn’t move. Then he drove away while I was still walking through the sliding doors.

I told myself it was fine on the walk from the entrance to the ward. I told myself it again while the nurse took my blood pressure. I was still telling myself it two hours later, lying in a bed that smelled like other people’s difficult days, waiting for a man who had not texted, had not called, had not come.

At hour two I picked up my phone. Not because I was expecting anything. Just because the ceiling had run out of things to offer.

Bastien had posted forty minutes ago.

A rooftop bar. His colleagues around him, everyone loose and laughing. Bastien at the centre of it, drink raised, face lit up with the particular brightness he only got when he had an audience. He looked completely at ease. He looked like a man without a single weight on him.

There was a woman beside him.

Dark hair. Dark dress. She was turned slightly toward him, mid-laugh, and his arm wasn’t around her but it was close. Close enough. I looked at her and felt something register that I didn’t have a name for yet.

I scrolled to the next post.

She was there again.

My thumb slowed.

I went back to the beginning of Bastien’s profile — something I realized, with a cold sliding feeling, I had almost never done. Not once in our relationship had I felt the need to. I had trusted him. I had made trusting him into a point of pride, into proof of how secure and uncomplicated I was as a partner.

I started counting.

She appeared eleven times across six months. Some photos were group shots. Some were just the two of them. In every single one, she was close to him in the easy, unthinking way of someone who had long since stopped calculating the distance.

I set the phone down on my chest.

Bastien had told me, early in our relationship, that he wasn’t a social media person. He found the performance of it exhausting. He kept his personal life private. When I had posted a photo of us on our second anniversary, he had asked me, gently but clearly, to take it down. I had apologized for posting it in the first place.

I had done that. I had apologized for documenting my own relationship.

I picked the phone back up and looked at the woman’s face again. Sharp features. Easy posture. The kind of person who walked into rooms like she had already arranged the furniture.

I composed a message to Bastien three times and deleted it three times. Whatever I said, he would have an answer for, delivered in that calm, patient voice that always made me feel like the problem was mine.

The nurse came in at eight o’clock. My blood pressure was better. I could go home in the morning if I rested.

“Is there anyone we should contact?” she asked, with the carefully neutral face of someone trained not to assume. “A partner? Family?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

She looked at me for a moment longer than necessary. “Get some rest,” she said, and dimmed the light.

I lay in the dark and looked at the woman’s face on my screen one more time. Then I looked at the photo of Bastien — his arm almost around her, the ease of it, the complete comfort of two people who did not need permission to be near each other.

And I thought about our anniversary photo. The one I took down. The one I apologized for.

Something that had been very tightly held inside me began, slowly and without ceremony, to come loose.

I didn’t name it yet. I wasn’t ready to name it.

But I stopped explaining her away.

I put the phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling in the dark and tried to remember the last time Bastien had come home early because I needed him to. The last time he had cancelled something for me. The last time I had been the priority and not the plan B, not the person he got to after everything else was handled.

I tried for a long time.

I couldn’t find one.

Not because they didn’t exist — I told myself that quickly, defensively. It was just that I was tired and in a hospital bed and my thinking wasn’t clear. There were examples. Of course there were examples. Five years was a long time. There had to be examples.

The harder I tried to find one, the louder the silence got.

I turned the screen off. I lay in the dark. And for the first time in five years, I let myself sit with a question instead of immediately building a wall around it.

What if I had been wrong about all of it?