Chapter 22
1028 Words
*Alexander's POV*
I was already moving before I made the decision to move.
That was the honest truth. My legs just went. Across the waiting room, past the reception desk, past everything....and straight toward her. Like she was a magnet and I was the most helpless piece of metal in the entire building.
Elena.
She was real. She was here. She was right in front of me and I had spent so many nights drowning in whiskey trying to blur her face and here it was ...sharp and clear and more beautiful than my memory had been doing it justice.
She hadn't seen me yet.
And then she did.
I watched it happen. The exact moment her eyes found mine across the floor. Her step faltered just slightly, just one half-beat and her face did something complicated and fast that she shut down almost immediately. Her chin lifted. Her jaw set. Her eyes went careful.
But for that one half-second before the wall went up, I saw it.
And it cracked something open in my chest that I had been keeping nailed shut for months.
I did this to her, some part of me said. You did this. You look at her face right now and you remember that you did this.
The guilt hit me like a physical thing, heavy and sudden, pressing down behind my sternum. She had loved me. Genuinely and completely. And I had stood in front of the whole world and chosen her sister.
I was a monster.
I was genuinely a monster.
And then my eyes moved ...just slightly, just one degree to the left and landed on the man standing beside her.
A talk dark man, who looked awfully familiar. Standing next to Elena with the particular ease of someone who was exactly where he was supposed to be, relaxed in a way that made my jaw tighten before I had even fully registered why.
The guilt curdled and shifted to jealousy.
I felt hot and unreasonable and completely irrational that I had absolutely no right to feel and felt anyway with my entire body.
"What the hell are you doing with him?"
The words came out before I could stop them. Before I had thought them through, before I had constructed any kind of reasonable opening, or I had remembered that I was a married man in a hospital with my wife twenty feet behind me.
Elena stared at me for few seconds, as if she was trying to regain back her composure.
Then something shifted in her eyes .... the shock dissolving, the wall solidifying, the Elena I remembered replaced entirely by someone who had clearly spent the last several months learning how to look at me like I was nothing.
"I'm sorry?" Her voice was calm. Dangerously calm. "Who exactly do you think you are?"
"Elena..."
"No, genuinely." She tilted her head. "Who are you to walk across a room and ask me that question? What part of your life gave you the impression that who I am with is any of your business?"
"I just..."
"You just what, Alexander?"
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
She was right. She was completely right and I knew it and my mouth had nothing useful to offer in response because there was no good answer to that question. I had no claim. I had no ground to stand on. I had signed every right I ever had to ask her anything when I married her sister on a livestream in front of the entire world.
My eyes dropped.
And everything else stopped.
And my face fell on her bump.
The soft curve beneath her coat that my brain had clocked from across the room but hadn't fully processed until right now, standing three feet away from her.
She had kept it.
She had kept My baby.
Something happened inside me that I don't have clean words for. A wave of this enormous and warm and gutting feeling all at once ... relief, grief, wonder, shame, call it anything crashing through me at the same time, leaving me standing there completely hollowed out.
My voice came out different this time. The anger was gone, scraped clean away.
"Elena." I took one step toward her. "You kept the baby." I shook my head slowly. "You could have told me. You should have told me that you kept our..."
I reached for her hand.
I don't know what I thought was going to happen. I don't know what version of this moment I had constructed in my head in the half-second between seeing her bump and reaching out. I just reached toward her. Like reaching for her was muscle memory. Like my hand remembered hers even when my brain had forgotten what it had no right to want anymore.
My fingers were an inch from hers.
A hand came from nowhere.
It was hard, fast, and completely certain — it closed around Elena's wrist and pulled her hand back and away before I could touch it, stepping her sideways and slightly behind him in one clean movement.
The man looked at me.
And for the first time I looked at him ... really looked. He had calm eyes. He didn't look aggressive. Just absolutely, immovably certain, the way a person is certain when they are standing on ground that belongs entirely to them.
"Don't you dare," he said quietly, "touch my wife."
The word detonated in my skull.
Wife.??!
I heard it. I processed the syllable. I understood the word. I spoke English, I knew what it meant and still my brain refused to assemble it into a sentence that made sense when placed next to Elena's name.
I looked at him.
Looked at Elena.
Looked back at him.
"Wife?" The word came out of me like it had been punched loose. Barely above a whisper. "What did you just..."
I couldn't finish the sentence.
Because the greatest shock of my life had just walked across a hospital waiting room and introduced itself, and I was standing in the middle of it with my hand still outstretched and absolutely nothing left to say.
- Writer
