Page 4 of Nine Months to Love
I drain my tea, needing the warmth. “What do you want from me?”
“Nothing you’re not willing to give.” She refills my cup without asking. “Stay here tonight. Think things over.”
“And then?”
“Then, in the morning, you’ll have a choice to make. Go back to him, knowing what you know. Or walk away and build something real with someone who doesn’t lie to you.”
“You mean you.”
She shrugs. “I’d like that, but I won’t force it on you. I’m one option out of many. I won’t limit you to what I think is best. That would be repeating my past sins, and I swore not to do that again.”
But I’m still shaking my head, struggling to process the enormity of what all this might mean. “I’m pregnant with his child. Walking away isn’t that simple.”
“It never is.” She touches her own stomach, a ghost of memory, and perhaps of longing, too. “But staying with the wrong man for the sake of a child... that’s its own kind of prison.”
“Stefan’s not abusive.”
“Physical abuse isn’t the only kind, dear. He isolated you. Monitored you. Made you dependent on him. What do you call that?”
I want to argue but the words stick in my throat. How can I? So many things he did—guards and tapped phones, spiked fences and secretive eyes in the shadows—add up to a picture that cannot be denied.
She’s right in so many ways. I know she’s right. But it doesn’t change the way my heart accelerates when I think about him. Even here, even now, it hurts so wrong and so pure.
“You’re conflicted,” Natalia observes. “That’s natural. Stefan can be very compelling when he wants something.”
“And what does he want?”
“It’s long past time to stop asking that, Olivia. The question you ought to be focusing on is: What doyouwant?”
I don’t answer because I don’t know anymore. This morning I wanted Stefan. I wanted our baby and the future we were starting to build.
Now, I just want the truth. The whole truth. From everyone.
“I should warn you,” Natalia adds as she rises and drifts to the exit. Her hand lingers on the doorknob. “Stefan will say anything to get you back. Make any promise. He might even mean it at the time.”
“You don’t think he’s capable of change?”
“I think men like Stefan change for one reason only: when the cost of staying the same becomes too high.” She opens the door. “What if you’re that cost? Will he pay it? Will you?”
She leaves me alone with my cold tea and racing thoughts. Through the window, I watch the sun set over this fake suburban paradise.
Somewhere out there, Stefan is looking for me. Probably tearing the city apart.
Part of me wants him to find me.
Part of me hopes he never does.
I press my hand to my stomach, where our child grows obvious to all this chaos. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
The baby doesn’t reply. But then, I’m getting used to silence where answers should be.
2
STEFAN
My mother. Alive. That doesn’t make any fucking sense.
“You’re lying.”
