I BECAME HIS GREATEST REGRET

Chapter 3

Yelena POV

He was home before me.

I hadn’t expected that. I had prepared myself on the drive back for an empty apartment, a plate in the fridge, the specific silence of a man who had somewhere better to be. But Bastien was on the couch with his laptop when I pushed the door open, a glass of water on the side table, looking like a man who had never done a single thing wrong in his life.

“You’re back.” He glanced up. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” I said. The lie arrived so quickly I barely felt it leave.

I set my bag down. I sat in the armchair across from him instead of beside him on the couch, which was where I always sat, which was automatic. I sat across from him and looked at his face and told myself: be calm. Ask once. Don’t make it a fight.

I had never been the kind of woman who made fights. I had spent five years being proud of that.

“I saw your post last night,” I said.

“Mm.” He didn’t look up.

“You were at the Gilt Terrace. While I was in the hospital.”

He looked up then. His expression was patient — the particular patience of someone who has already decided they’re the reasonable one in the conversation.

“I had a work event, Yelena. I told you my evening was full.”

“I know.” I kept my voice level. “There’s a woman who keeps appearing in your photos. I was just wondering who she is.”

Something moved across his face. Not guilt. Closer to the irritation of someone whose carefully ordered day has developed an inconvenient snag.

“That’s Isolde. She’s the new creative director. Effectively my boss.” He closed the laptop. “We attend the same events. That’s how professional life works, Yelena.”

“You’ve never mentioned her.”

“I don’t report on every colleague I have.”

“She’s in eleven of your photos in six months.” I held his gaze. “And you’ve never posted me. Not once. Not in five years. You always said you didn’t—”

“Here we go.” He stood, moved to the window.

“I’m asking one question—”

“No, you’re building a case.” He turned and his voice was perfectly calm, perfectly measured, the voice he used when he had already positioned himself as the adult in the room. “You went through my profile, counted photographs, and decided to make something out of nothing. That’s not a question, Yelena. That’s a trust problem.”

“Then help me understand. Tell me who she is. Tell me why she’s everywhere.”

“I told you who she is.”

“Then explain why you’ve never mentioned her. Not once. In six months.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and his voice dropped and softened, which was the part I had never learned to defend against — that shift from cold to warm, so practised and so smooth that by the time I noticed it, I was already reaching for the warmth.

“I keep my work life and my private life separate. You’ve always known that about me.” He sat on the arm of the chair, close to me. “Isolde is my director. I cannot control who photographs us at company functions. And honestly? It worries me that you came home from the hospital and went straight to my profile instead of resting. That’s not a healthy response to stress.”

There it was. My response. My health. My problem.

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say.

The words were out before I had decided to say them. Five years of muscle memory.

He leaned in and pressed his lips to my forehead. “I know this week has been difficult. Let’s just get the appointment done, get through it, and move forward. We’ll be fine.”

He made dinner. I sat at the counter and watched him and assembled all the pieces of what he had said into a shape I could live with. His director. Professional obligations. A private person. All of it reasonable. All of it clean.

I was good at this. I had been doing it for so long it barely cost me anything anymore — the small internal adjustments, the recalibration of what I’d seen against what I’d been told, the careful management of my own instincts so they didn’t become inconvenient.

That night I lay in the dark beside him and listened to him breathe and thought about the eleven photographs and my own apology and the exact speed of that shift — cold to warm, accusation to forgiveness — and how smoothly it had happened. How little he’d had to work for it.

How many times had I done this?

How many times had I walked in with a question and walked away with an apology?

I stared at the ceiling and didn’t let myself count.

Instead I thought about the appointment in four days. The clinic. The thing we were going to get through so we could move forward. That was how he had framed it — as a logistics problem with a solution. Get through it. Move forward. As if the thing we were moving through wasn’t something I had pressed against my chest on a Wednesday morning and laughed about.

As if it wasn’t something I had wanted.

I hadn’t let myself say that out loud. Not to him, not to myself. Because wanting it would have made his response worse. Wanting it would have meant I had something to grieve, and grieving it in front of him would have been too much — the kind of emotional display he found difficult — and I had spent five years managing myself around what Bastien found difficult.

Lying in the dark beside a sleeping man who had spent twenty minutes making me apologize for a reasonable question, I was very tired.

Not the tired that sleep fixes.

The other kind.

I turned onto my side and looked at the back of his head and thought about the word easy. How many times I had been called that. Low maintenance. Uncomplicated. What a good partner she is. I had taken those as compliments. I had worked to earn them.

But easy for who? Uncomplicated for who?

For Bastien. Always for Bastien.

I closed my eyes. The appointment was in four days. I would get through it. We would move forward. That was the plan.

I slept badly and I didn’t tell him in the morning.