Chapter 10: Guest Room

Elena's POV

The guest room had an enormous bed and a bathroom bigger than my first apartment.

It also had a lock, and a small brass key on a ribbon that Maxim laid on the dresser without a word.

I used the key the first night, and I lay awake listening to him not knock.

He knocked on the third day.

"Breakfast," he said through the door. "I made eggs. They're bad."

They were bad.

I ate all of them, and he sat across the island and watched me do it.

"Stop looking at my plate," I said.

"I'm checking that you're eating."

"You're checking that I'm not."

"Eating, Elena." He rubbed his jaw. "I read that the first rule is protein."

He had a stack of books on the counter.

Six of them, with soft covers and cheerful titles.

Every page was flagged with yellow tabs, and he had made notes in the margins in his small, exact hand.

I picked one up and read, in the margin beside a diagram, Does she know this? Ask the doctor.

I put it back very carefully and said nothing.

By the end of the first week we had a rhythm.

He left at six and came home at seven, which was early for him.

He ate whatever I'd found in the fridge.

On the fifth night I came back from the bath at nine and he was in the living room in his shirtsleeves, trying to put together a crib.

It was a beautiful crib, pale wood and square-cornered.

It was in eleven pieces on the rug, and he was kneeling in the middle of them.

"There is a step missing," he said.

"There's a step missing in your temper."

He glanced up and almost laughed, and the look on his face made me turn around and go back to my room.

That night my back began to hurt at midnight.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Said Children Were a Mistake, So I Ran With His Baby from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.