Everything gone.
My mother sat me down and showed me a signed lease termination and a bank transfer.
She told me you’d taken two hundred thousand dollars out of the family foundation and gone to London with a man you’d known before me.
And she told me—” my voice cracked, and I made myself say it plainly, “—she told me the pregnancy was over.
That you’d ended it, taken the money, and left.
That there was no baby, and there was no you, and there never would be again.”
Yelena went absolutely still.
Every drop of color left her face so fast I put my hand out, afraid she’d fall.
“She told you,” she said, barely a breath, “that there was no baby.”
“I believed her.” The shame of it was enormous.
“God help me, I believed her.
I spent three months in a hotel in Paris drinking myself half to death because I thought the woman I loved had destroyed our child and sold the wreckage for cash.
I didn’t proposed to anyone for six years, Yelena, because every time someone put a ring in front of me, all I could see was you.”
I need you to understand what those six years had actually been, because the surface of my life gave nothing away.