He Said Children Were a Mistake, So I Ran With His Baby novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: What He Said That Morning
By six that evening there were forty photographers on the sidewalk.
Maxim had called the doorman and told him to lock the front doors.
It didn't matter.
They had been outside since the broadcast, and they wanted my face.
He met me in the lobby with his coat in his hand and put it around my shoulders.
"Look at me," he said. "Not at them. Only me."
We walked out through the side door to where the car waited, with a wall of cameras straight ahead.
Somebody screamed my name.
Somebody shouted, "Is the baby a mistake, Mr. Kovalev?"
Maxim stopped.
I felt the whole street go quiet around us.
He turned toward the shouting.
"No," he said, loud enough to carry to the curb. "I was."
The flashes went off all at once.
He got me into the car and closed the door, and I saw his hands on the wheel.
They weren't steady.
We drove to the penthouse in silence.
In the elevator I stared at the numbers climbing, and every one of them was louder than the last.
He unlocked the door and I walked in first and turned around.
"The morning after Singapore," I said.
He stopped with his hand on the knob.
"You buttoned your shirt with your back to me. You said, 'That was a mistake. It doesn't happen again. I need you to understand that.' Then you asked me to move the nine o'clock call."
His eyes closed.
"I said, 'Of course.' I put on yesterday's dress and went down in the service elevator so nobody would see. I ran your calendar for four more weeks and I never let you see my face."
"Elena."
"I loved you for four years, Maxim."
I had never said it out loud.
Not to him, not to Nonna, not to myself in the mirror.
"I loved you, and you called it a mistake before I'd put my shoes on."
He crossed the room in three steps and stopped an inch away from me.
His hands hung at his sides.
"It was the worst sentence I have ever said," he said. "I've said it to myself every day since."
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