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“You Volkov men have no concept of privacy. Your whole family is a den of shadows,” I say.

“I didn’t come here to fight with you.” He takes a breath, and something in his shoulders drops. “Vanessa and I are finished. I called off the wedding a few weeks ago.” There’s pride in his voice. I stare at him while hospital life flows around the two of us, nurses and wheelchairs and worried families, none of them looking twice at us.

“Congratulations,” I say, mimicking the nurses’ romance-movie cheer. “Shall I send Vanessa a sympathy card? I could even sign it for you.”

His face freezes over. “I made a mistake,” he says, then murmurs something in Russian. “You were a good girl, Delaney.” I refuse to take a compliment from his mouth after everything he did. A mistake doesn’t get him off the hook.

I throw his own words back at him, the ones about how he could not stand being near me for so long. The old wounds ache less than they once did. “Mistake or not, you still fucked me over,” I finish.

“I’m sorry,” Maksim says. “I can’t sleep. I dream about you. Vanessa is cruel, a hyena, voice higher the angrier she gets, screaming at the staff, demanding her way about everything. She only ever wanted the Volkov name and the money.”

“I’m not going to be your backup plan after a broken engagement,” I say. Both brothers have treated me as a substitute, an unworthy shadow standing in for another woman.

“Let me take care of you and the baby,” Maksim says.

I’m speechless. “Is your brain waterlogged? It is Lev’s child. Your brother is the one who impregnated me.”

“I know exactly whose child it is,” he says, steady. “The child shouldn’t have to pay for the mistakes the adults made. None of this is the baby’s fault.” The whole thing is so absurd, this man offering to raise his own twin brother’s child, that I wonder for a moment if the hypoxia left me feverish and hearing things.

“You should know something before you decide anything,” he goes on. “Lev and Yelena have a serious history, going back to before either of us could walk. He truly loved her. He never once got over her leaving him. Lev has a reputation for never letting go, after all. The whole family knows it, and no one has ever dared bring it up to his face, not even our mother.”

The cold of the ocean comes back over me despite the warm afternoon sun. Hearing it said out loud, plainly, by the one person who has no reason to lie about it, turns me to ice all over again.

I already knew. I watched him choose her in the water. Somehow hearing the reason behind it is worse than the moment itself.

“You are two days too late with that news,” I say. “I already watched exactly who he chose.”

Maksim looks surprised that I already knew. He doesn’t ask about the yacht, which is its own kind of answer, complicated and unspoken, as though someone has already covered his ass.

“Then you should definitely leave,” he says.

“I’m going to,” I answer, and he looks stunned by how easily I agree.

“I’m going to resign and move away,” I say. “But not for you. Don’t confuse the two things.”

“Let me take you somewhere he cannot find you, a real safehouse,” Maksim offers. “Your own place, your own work, good doctors, everything Milo and the baby will need.” He says it without pressure, the words classy, alluring, promising all at once.

The offer tempts me more than it has any right to. A place with no Lev in it, no more telling myself I want the safety and the danger. A better school for Milo. A safe birth in a clean hospital. No more counting coins at the end of every month, no more choosing which bill goes unpaid. Security laid out in front of me like a soft bed after two years of sleeping on the hard floor. For a woman carrying a child with nowhere safe to carry it, that offer is almost impossible to refuse.

I’m tempted to forget everything. Then I remember his foot sliding into the aisle at Sablo House, the whole room laughing, my pride trampled, the gin slicking my shirt, my blood on the marble. The man offering me safety now is the exact same one who betrayed me then, in front of everyone.

He’s my betrayer wearing a kinder, thinner face, and I’ve learned the hard way not to trust a Volkov who is being gentle with me.

“Why would you do this?” I ask, a look of vague distrust on my face.

“Because I owe you,” he says.

“A debt is not the same thing as love,” I tell him.

“Then call it compensation,” he says. “Or a fresh start for both of us. Call it whatever name makes it easier to take. I’m not asking you to love me. I’m asking you to let me help.”

My hand settles over my abdomen in a small, exploratory touch, and I weigh the money and the safety and the distance from Lev, and the good school and the clean birth, and the whole thing crashes together into pure chaos in my head. I cannot think straight. My thoughts unravel as fast as I gather them. I have not eaten. I nearly died two days ago, and I’m standing on a sidewalk deciding my child’s future with the wrong brother.

I cannot tell whether Maksim is a way out or just another abyss opening up under my feet. “I don’t know,” I say honestly.

I promise myself, silently, that I will never fully hand myself over to any man again. I will lean on my own two calloused hands, the ones that carried trays through every bad year, to keep my own family standing.

Maksim relaxes, his flexed jaw loosening, taking my answer as far better than he expected, and opens the passenger door for me.