Chapter 24 #2
She doesn’t open her eyes, but her grip tightens for a second, as if she knows exactly where I am.
I don’t know how long I stay like that. Time feels different in there. Smaller. More tender. The nurse speaks to me once or twice, but most of what I hear is my own breathing and the little sounds around my daughter’s bed.
Eventually I’m wheeled back out.
The hallway outside my room is quiet when I return. The nurse leaves me for a minute to get my medication, and I sit there with my hands in my lap, still feeling the shape of my daughter’s hand around my finger.
“That was quick.”
I look up. Alina is standing a few feet away, elegant as ever, not a hair out of place, which somehow makes her presence in a hospital corridor feel even more deliberate.
I say nothing.
She steps closer. “May I speak to you?”
I’m too tired to refuse her properly, so I nod once.
For a second neither of us says anything.
Then she steps closer and asks, “How is she?”
It takes me a second to understand she means the baby.
“She’s in the NICU,” I say. “Small, but stable, from what they told me.”
Alina nods once. Not warm, not cold. Just absorbing the information.
“And the wedding?” I ask, because the question slips out before I can stop it. Maybe because some part of me still can’t believe the day simply ended without anyone saying the words aloud.
She gives a short, bitter scoff. “The wedding is over,” she says. “For good.”
There’s no drama in the way she says it. No heartbreak either. Just finality. Like one more thing has broken and she’s too tired to pretend it can be repaired.
I look down at my hands for a moment and then back at her. “I’m sorry.”
She studies my face, and something unreadable passes through her expression. “No,” she says. “You’re not.”
The words should sting, but I’m too exhausted for them to find the right place to land.
Alina glances down the corridor, making sure we’re still alone, then looks back at me. “Listen,” she says, and now her voice lowers, the polish thinning just enough to let something more personal through. “I don’t know what’s going on with Viktor.”
I stay still.
“But whatever this is,” she continues, “it’s moving too quickly, and I’m asking you to think carefully before you let yourself be pulled any deeper into it.”
I look at her for a long moment. “You’re asking me.”
“Yes.”
“Or warning me?”
“If you prefer.”
That almost makes me smile, but not quite.
She folds her arms, not defensively, more like she needs something to hold herself together while she says the rest.
“You don’t know him,” she says. “Not really. You know the version of him he allows people to see when he wants something, or when he’s decided someone matters enough to turn his full attention on them.
That can feel like devotion. It can feel like safety.
It can feel like being chosen in a way that’s hard to walk away from. ”
Her eyes stay on mine.
“But it comes with a cost.”
I hear the ache under the control now. Not loud. Not theatrical. Old and disciplined and still alive.
“What cost?” I ask.
Her mouth tightens. “Your center of gravity changes. His needs become the weather in the room. His enemies become your enemies. His silences become things you live around. And one day you wake up and realize you’ve built your life around the shape of a man who was never going to bend enough to make room for anyone else. ”
For a moment I let the silence sit between us. Then I say, quietly, “You still love him.”
She doesn’t deny it right away. That tells me more than the denial would have.
When she finally speaks, her voice is calm again, but less steady than before. “This isn’t about love.”
“Yes, it is.”
Her eyes flash. “Don’t be naive.”
“I’m not.”
That surprises her enough to make her pause.
I go on before she can take the conversation back. “I’m not saying that to be cruel,” I say. “I’m saying it because you’re standing in a hospital after your son’s wedding fell apart, talking to the woman who just had a baby, and all you really want to talk about is Viktor.”
Something in her face closes at that. “You still don’t get it do you?”
I look at her and say nothing.
She takes one step toward me, not enough to crowd me, just enough to make sure I hear every word. “He keeps choosing you,” she says. “Over and over again.”
The corridor goes very quiet.
“It’s so obvious to me that this isn’t about a passing distraction or a moment of weakness or some reckless mess that will fade once the shock wears off.
” She looks down the hall for a second, then back at me.
“I’ve known Viktor too long not to see it.
He chooses very little with his whole heart.
But when he does, everyone around him feels it. ”
There’s no bitterness in her voice now.
Only certainty. And something like grief.
“I watched it on the lawn,” she says. “I heard it in the way he spoke about you. I saw it again in the hospital. He keeps choosing you in every room he walks into, whether he means to or not.”
I don’t know what to do with that. Part of me wants to reject it immediately. Part of me wants to hold it close and believe it so badly it makes my chest ache.
Alina sees all of that on my face. “That’s why I came to you,” she says. “Walk away from his life and I’ll give you ten million dollars.”
I let out a scoff. “Is that how much he means to you? You can put a price tag on him?”
She looks like she’s moments away from slapping me.
Before I can say anything else, footsteps come down the corridor behind Alina.
Maksim.
I don’t know how long he’s been there, or how much of the conversation he heard, but the moment Alina sees him, something in her face changes.
Not guilt. Not exactly. Just a brief, unmistakable shake in her composure, as if his presence has caught her without the armor fully in place.
“Maksim,” she says.
He looks from her to me, then to the nurse with the medication cart, and takes in the whole scene with one quick, unreadable glance.
“Alina.”
The way he says her name is simple. Familiar. Too familiar for this to be nothing, and too restrained for me to understand what it is.
Alina straightens at once, but the recovery isn’t perfect. I see the crack before she smooths over it. “I was just leaving,” she says.
“That would be wise,” he replies.
She holds his gaze for a second longer than she needs to, then looks at me.
Her face is controlled again, almost calm, but I can still feel the echo of whatever passed through her when he arrived.
“We’ll speak another time,” she says.
It isn’t a threat. It isn’t kindness either. Just a promise that this isn’t over.
She turns and walks away down the corridor. Maksim watches her go, expression unreadable, until she disappears around the corner. Only then does he look back at me.
“You shouldn’t be sitting out here,” he says.
The nurse, who clearly has no interest in whatever complicated history just brushed past her cart, nods briskly. “That’s what I said.”
Maksim steps behind my chair and puts his hands on the handles.
“I can walk,” I say automatically.
“Of course you can,” he says. “That isn’t the point.”
And before I can argue further, he starts wheeling me back toward my room. The motion is smooth, careful. Not rushed. Not gentle in a pitying way either. Just competent, like everything else about him.
I look up at him over my shoulder. “How long were you standing there?”
“Long enough.”
That tells me nothing.
I study his face, hoping for some clue, but he gives me very little. If he heard the worst of it, he isn’t going to say so in the hallway.
He gets me through the doorway and turns the chair neatly toward the bed. The nurse follows us in, sets the medicine down, checks something on the chart, then leaves again.
For the first time since Alina stopped me, I exhale properly.
But then, suddenly, my head grows heavy and the world starts to blur around me.