I BECAME HIS GREATEST REGRET

Chapter 5

Yelena POV

“Are you alright?”

I turned around.

He was tall — that was the first thing I registered. Then that he was still holding my arm. Then his face, which was doing something complicated: the expression of a man whose body had moved faster than his mind and was only now catching up with what had just happened.

Early thirties, maybe. Dark coat, collar turned up against the cold. The look of someone who had been going somewhere with purpose and had just completely abandoned that purpose because of me.

“I’m fine,” I said.

He looked at me like I’d said something in a language he didn’t speak.

“You walked into traffic."

“I know."

“It nearly hit you.”

“I know.” My voice came out flat. Not rude — just hollowed out, the voice of a person running on the frequency just below feeling. “I wasn’t paying attention. I’m sorry.”

He let go of my arm slowly, like a person releasing something he wasn’t entirely sure could stand on its own. He ran a hand through his hair and looked at the empty road and then back at my face, and whatever he found there made him press his lips together.

“Is there someone I can call?”

“No.”

He held my gaze for a moment. Then he looked up the street.

“There’s a bar just up here. Come and sit down for a bit.”

“You really don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t.” No pressure in it. No performance of being a good person. Just the simple, unadorned fact. “Come on.”

I went. I couldn’t have told you exactly why. Maybe because he wasn’t asking me to perform anything — not okayness, not gratitude, not an explanation. He just started walking and my feet followed, because standing still on that pavement felt like something I couldn’t afford to do.

The bar was five doors down. Warm inside, low-lit, the quiet of a place between its busy hours. A bartender moving slowly. Nobody looked at us.

He found a corner table and pulled out a chair. I sat. I put my bag on my lap and held the strap with both hands.

He ordered without asking what I wanted — two drinks arrived, warm and dark with something underneath that burned cleanly going down. He set one in front of me and wrapped both hands around his own glass and looked at the bar instead of at me.

I waited for the questions. The well-meaning interrogation. The performance of care that ultimately required me to manage someone else’s feelings about my situation.

The questions didn’t come.

He sat in the silence like he lived there. Comfortable and still, a man with nowhere urgent to be, and gradually I stopped waiting and just sat too, and the warmth from the glass moved up through my palms.

“I’m Caius,” he said, after a long while.

“Yelena.”

He nodded. Looked at the bar. Didn’t fill the space.

And then I started talking.

I didn’t decide to. It came up the way water comes through old walls — quiet at first, and then all at once, and no stopping it. I told him about the clinic. The paper gown I had folded and left on the chair. The notification I had opened on the examination table. Bastien on one knee at Maison Sèvres — our restaurant — while I sat waiting for him to come back through the door.

I told him about the woman in eleven photographs and the anniversary photo I had been asked to take down and the hospital room I had lain in alone.

And then I told him about the baby.

I hadn’t planned to say that part. It came out with everything else and the moment it did, something released in my chest — a pressure I had been holding since yesterday morning, since the bathroom floor, since those two pink lines I had pressed against my sternum like something worth protecting.

I didn’t cry. I had expected to, but I didn’t. I spoke in a flat, even voice, the voice of someone on the other side of crying, in the quieter territory that comes after. And Caius listened — completely, unhurriedly, without once interrupting or nodding along or telling me what to feel about it. He just listened the way almost nobody listens anymore, like my words were the only thing in the room.

When I finally stopped, I looked up and the bar had filled around us without me noticing. The candle between us had burned considerably shorter. Music played at low volume.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t know me.”

“No.” He looked at me steadily. “But you needed someone who didn’t.”

I looked at him properly then, for the first time since we’d sat down.

He had calm, steady eyes. The kind that stayed where they were when they looked at you — that didn’t drift or glance away to ease the pressure. He was watching me the way I had forgotten people could watch each other. Not like I was a problem. Not like I was an obligation. Just a person, present, in front of him, and that was enough reason to be here.

Something in my chest did something quiet and unexpected.

I don’t know which of us moved first. The space between us had been closing slowly, without announcement, and then his hand was against the side of my face — warm and careful and completely still — and my eyes closed, and the noise of the bar went soft and distant, and for the first time in what felt like a very long time I was simply here. Not performing anything. Not managing anything.

Just breathing.

His thumb moved gently against my cheekbone and I leaned into it without deciding to, the way a person moves toward warmth.

Then I heard the laugh.

A specific laugh. One I had been hearing for five years.

My eyes opened.

Across the bar — coat still on, drink already in hand, mid-story, completely at home — was Bastien.

He was animated and easy, the natural centre of a group of colleagues, gesturing with his glass. He looked lighter than I had seen him in months. I understood now exactly why. The weight he’d been carrying — the decision, the timing, the management of two women at once — was gone. He had made his choice. He was free.

And on his arm, fingers wrapped around his elbow with the total ease of a woman who had been doing it for a very long time and never had to hide it —

Isolde.

The ring on her left hand caught the candlelight and scattered it in a small bright arc across the wall.

Caius’s hand was still warm against my face. I was still turned toward him. Bastien was twenty feet away celebrating his engagement at a bar five doors from the clinic he had left me in, and the only thought I had — clearly, quietly, without drama — was:

Of course.

Of course it ends here. Of course this is how it looks.

Bastien turned his head.

His eyes found me across the room and everything stopped. The story he was telling died mid-sentence. The glass froze in his hand. I watched something move through his face that I had never seen there before — not in five years, not once — something unguarded and fractured and almost human.

He looked afraid.

Not of losing me. I understood that immediately, with a cold, perfect clarity. He was afraid of what I knew. He was afraid of what I was going to do with it.

Isolde followed his gaze. Her smile stayed in place, but her eyes went hard and flat the way a person’s eyes go when they have just identified a threat.

I held Bastien’s gaze across the bar.

I did not look away.

I did not flinch.

I picked up my drink with my free hand, took a slow sip, and turned back to Caius as if Bastien Vael had just ceased to be the most important person in any room I was ever in.

Because he had.

That was the moment. Right there, with something warm on my tongue and a stranger’s hand against my face and my ex-boyfriend staring at me from twenty feet away.

That was the moment I stopped.