Chapter 9: The Night She Became a Mother
Roman stood on the sidewalk outside the restaurant with his phone in his hand and the city moving around him as though nothing had changed.
Marco was beside him.
"Go," Marco said.
It was the only time in eleven years he had given Roman a direction without being asked.
"I don't know where she is."
"Yes you do."
Roman looked at him.
"Lincoln Square," Marco said quietly.
"The building Rebecca's name is on the lease for.
You've known the address for three weeks."
Roman had not gone there.
He had made himself not go there.
He looked at the message again.
The number was not one he recognized.
Not Lena.
Not Rebecca.
Not Vincent.
Someone had chosen to tell him.
He got in the car.
The building in Lincoln Square was a four-story brick walk-up on a residential street with a small grocery on the corner and a park visible at the end of the block.
The kind of street where nothing announced itself.
Roman sat in the car across from it for four minutes.
Then he got out.
He did not go to the door.
He stood on the pavement outside and looked up at the lit windows on the third floor, and he waited, and he did not know what he was waiting for.
At 11:47 in the evening, a light went on in a room he hadn't been watching — second floor, far left.
At 11:52, Rebecca Marín came out the front door.
She stopped when she saw him.
They looked at each other across the width of the pavement.
"She doesn't know you're here," Rebecca said.
"I know."
"You can't go up."
"I know that too."
Rebecca crossed her arms.
She was still in the clothes she'd been wearing during the day, a jacket she hadn't bothered to button against the night air.
Her eyes were red at the edges.
"She's all right?" Roman said.
Rebecca's jaw tightened.
"She's more than all right." Her voice was controlled and precise in the way of someone managing a feeling they had decided not to show.
"She's extraordinary.
She did it without you, which she already knew she could, and she was right."
Roman looked at the building.
"The baby," he said.
Rebecca was quiet for a moment.
"She's healthy," she said.
"She's perfect." A pause.
"Her name is Elena."
Elena.
The letter E on the blanket.
The mobile with the silver stars.
The room Celeste had built and painted and furnished alone, in a locked corridor, while Roman had been somewhere else entirely.
His throat tightened in a way he didn't try to manage.
"Tell her—" he started.
"No," Rebecca said.
"Whatever you want to say to Celeste, you say to Celeste.
Not through me.
Not tonight." She looked at him steadily.
"Tonight is hers.
You don't get to be part of it."
Roman nodded.
He stood there another moment.
He was not sure what he had come here expecting.
Not to go up.
Not to make a claim.
He had come, he understood now, simply because he could not be somewhere else while this was happening.
"Is there anything she needs?" he said.
"Practically.
Anything."
Rebecca studied him.
"She has everything she needs."
"If that changes—"
"It won't.
But if it does, I have Vincent's number." She paused.
"He told me you gave him your word.
About not looking for her."
"I gave it."
"He believed you." Rebecca looked at him carefully.
"I'm still deciding."
She went back inside.
Roman stood on the pavement for a while longer.
The light on the third floor was still on.
He thought about the nursery in the penthouse.
The pale yellow walls and the handpainted flowers along the baseboard and the eight books on the shelf.
He thought about Celeste on her knees painting those flowers alone, at seven months, in a room she had never shown him because she had understood, long before he did, that she would be doing this without him.
He thought about the word *consequences* and how she had used it the night she left.
*Some consequences don't arrive when you make the mistake.
They arrive later.*
He walked back to the car.
Marco said nothing.
They drove back toward the penthouse in silence, and somewhere in the second mile Roman said, without looking away from the window, "Her name is Elena."
May you like
Marco kept his eyes on the road.
"That's a good name," he said.
