I hung up.
I stood there in the wind.
I did not yet know whether those four boys were truly mine — the rational part of me kept insisting on caution, on tests, on proof.
But underneath the caution something older and more certain had already decided, and that certainty had one instruction only: that I would not put a ring on any woman’s hand in that conservatory until I understood why Yelena had vanished six years ago, and, more than that — who had made me believe she’d wanted to.
It should have been a wrenching thing, canceling that announcement.
Months of planning, two hundred guests, a merger with a European position riding on it, my mother’s whole strategy for the next decade of the family — all of it detonated with two words to an assistant on a freezing sidewalk.
And I felt, instead, something I had not felt in six years, which was relief. Enormous, physical relief, like setting down a weight I’d carried so long I’d stopped feeling it as weight and started feeling it as my own spine.
That was how I knew, even before I knew anything else, that the life I was walking away from had never been mine.
A man does not feel relief detonating a life he loves.
I had built, or let others build, an entire existence so carefully insulated from feeling that the moment feeling finally broke back in — four small faces in a mirror — the whole structure revealed itself instantly as the prison it had always been.
I stood on that sidewalk having just set fire to everything my mother had arranged for me, and I felt lighter than I had since I was twenty-six.
I should have been afraid.
I was only free.
Chapter 9 — Her Name on the Screen