I BECAME HIS GREATEST REGRET

Chapter 4

Yelena POV

The clinic waiting room had eight people in it.

I counted them twice. I had been counting things since I was a child — ceiling tiles, parked cars, the seconds between streetlights on a night drive. It was what my brain did when it needed somewhere small to live. Something manageable. Something with a definite answer.

Eight people. All wearing the same studied neutrality. All performing the same quiet fiction of being somewhere ordinary.

So was I.

Bastien had come in with me that morning. He had parked the car and walked me through the entrance and sat beside me in the waiting room with a coffee from the machine down the hall — fixed exactly how I took it, without being asked. For twenty minutes I had sat next to him and felt something in my chest go still and quiet with relief. He was here. He had shown up. Maybe I had been wrong about the rest of it. Maybe I was always wrong when I was scared.

Then his phone buzzed.

He looked at the screen and said five minutes and went back through the glass doors.

That was forty-five minutes ago.

I had been called through to change. I had walked the corridor alone. Now I sat on a narrow examination table in a paper gown, holding my phone, telling myself he was in reception right now, asking someone at the desk which room.

I was not going to open i********:.

I had made that decision on the drive over. I was going to be present today. I was going to get through this one day without looking for things to hurt me. I was going to put the phone away and breathe and let today just be what it was.

I opened i********:.

The notification was forty-nine minutes old. My thumb moved before my brain caught up with it.

The photo loaded slowly. Then all at once.

Bastien was on one knee on the floor of Maison Sèvres.

My favourite restaurant. The one he had taken me to for my birthday two years in a row. The one I had always, privately, thought of as ours.

The lighting was amber and warm and the kind of deliberate that doesn’t happen by accident — someone had planned this, had chosen this room and this light. He was looking up at Isolde, who stood above him with both hands pressed over her mouth, tears already on her face, her entire body radiating the joy of a woman receiving something she had always known was coming.

The ring in the box was large and clearly chosen with care.

The caption was just the date. And a ring emoji.

I read it three times.

I read it a fourth time because my brain kept refusing to finish the sentence.

He had been here. He had left me in a waiting room in a paper gown and driven directly here. To our restaurant. To propose to a woman he had told me was just a colleague. While I sat on this table. While I waited for him to come back through those glass doors.

He was never coming back through those glass doors.

My hands were steady. That was the strange part — my hands were completely, eerily steady while my whole life rearranged itself around me into a shape I didn’t recognise.

I got down from the table.

I dressed in the small curtained cubicle, slowly and carefully. I folded the paper gown and set it on the chair. I don’t know why I folded it — habit, maybe, or the need to leave something neat behind me even when everything else was falling apart. I straightened it. I picked up my bag. I walked out.

The nurse said my name. I said I’m sorry, I have to go and kept walking. Through the waiting room, past the small green plant in the corner that someone watered every day, through the glass door and out into the cold.

I started walking. No direction. No plan. My body just moved.

The city went on around me — a bus, two women arguing, a dog pulling at its lead — and none of it reached me. I moved through it like weather.

I thought about my mother’s voice. I just don’t think he sees you, Yelena. And my own voice, so certain, so dismissive: you don’t know him like I do.

I thought about my cousin driving three hours to take me to lunch and spending the whole meal not saying his name, and then at the end holding both my hands across the table and saying you can always come home. I had laughed it off. I had felt sorry for her, for not understanding what Bastien and I had.

I thought about every friend who had quietly disappeared. Every birthday I had missed. Every plan I had cancelled. Every small, quiet piece of myself I had folded up and put away to make room for a man who was currently celebrating his engagement at our restaurant while I stood in a clinic hallway alone.

The road opened up in front of me.

I stepped off the curb without looking.

I was somewhere else entirely — years back, my mother’s face — and I didn’t see the headlights or hear the engine or register anything at all until a hand grabbed my arm and pulled me back so hard I stumbled, and the car tore past with its horn already fading behind it.

I stood on the pavement.

I was breathing.

The hand was still holding my arm.