Chapter 91 91
Kate’s POV
When I woke up, the first thing I remembered wasn’t the pain of labor, nor the baby’s cry, nor even the brutal relief of it all being over.
The first thing that came back to my mind was a name.
Caleb Martins.
Not just the name, but the surname spoken with that certainty that had left me frozen amid the exhaustion, the blood, the sweat, and the tears. Elliot hadn’t suggested it. He hadn’t said it like someone playing with a pretty idea. He had pronounced it with a conviction that pierced me completely, as if the child had already carried his mark long before opening his eyes to the world. I didn’t correct him. I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t have the clarity either. I watched him hold the baby with that unbearable mix of wonder and certainty, and I stayed silent. Now, with the dull dawn light coming through the hospital window and my body still aching everywhere, those two words kept spinning inside me.
Caleb Martins.
Every time I repeated them silently, I felt a pang of tenderness, another of fear, and another—worse still—of something that looked too much like surrender.
Andrew wasn’t here.
I searched for my phone on the bedside table. It wasn’t where I remembered it. When I finally found it and saw it was turned off, I felt something close to resignation even before turning it on. Andrew had written. Several messages. All correct. All full of that clean guilt that does nothing when you’re already gone.
“Urgent meeting with the Koreans. Leaving on the jet. Sorry I’m not there, love. Elliot told me you were okay. Call me when you can.”
Everything was written as if I were just another item on his agenda, a domestic crisis to handle between commitments. Not a single desperate word. No “I’m on my way,” no “fuck the Koreans,” not a single sign of that kind of madness a woman expects—even if she later says she doesn’t—when she’s giving birth and believes her body is splitting in two. And the most uncomfortable thing to admit wasn’t the disappointment. It was something else. It was realizing I hadn’t missed him. Not in the moment the pain doubled me over, nor when I thought I wouldn’t have the strength to keep pushing, much less when the baby came out of me and they placed him on my chest. I never once looked for Andrew with my eyes. Never. Because Elliot was there.
Elliot was the hand that held me. The voice that ordered me to breathe when I no longer wanted to. The face I saw again and again while I broke apart. And when the child cried and they laid him on me, Elliot was still beside me, looking at us with an intensity I still don’t know whether it calmed me or condemned me more.
The room was silent when I finished reading the messages. That private suite on the maternity floor was too spacious, too comfortable, too pretty.
Pale walls, huge window, sofa in the corner, transparent crib beside my bed—everything seemed designed to give a false sense of peace. There were flowers in a vase. White roses. Of course they were from Elliot. Andrew would never have thought of something like that in the middle of an emergency. He would send an elegant arrangement hours later, when someone from his office reminded him. Elliot, on the other hand, had placed them there as if he needed to leave a mark even in the air I breathed.
I looked toward the crib expecting to find the baby asleep, but he wasn’t there. The jolt made me sit up too quickly and my body punished me immediately. I felt the pull low in my belly, the burning between my legs, my back turned into an alien, painful surface. Then I saw him in the corner, sitting in a chair by the window, holding the child in his arms. He was speaking to him in a low voice. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could hear the tone. Soft, focused, almost reverent. There was nothing of his usual arrogance in that scene. Only attention. Only a seriousness that squeezed my chest in an absurd way.
The baby slept wrapped in a light blue blanket, small and warm against Elliot’s dark suit, as if he had always belonged there.
I must have made some sound, because Elliot looked up immediately. His eyes found mine and his expression changed in an instant. He smiled with fatigue, but also with something more delicate I hadn’t seen on him so easily.
“Good morning,” he said, standing carefully so as not to wake the baby.
His voice was low, hoarse, as if he had barely slept. I watched him walk toward the bed and realized he was still wearing the same formal clothes from the day before. The jacket hung over the back of the chair, the shirt wrinkled at the cuffs, tie missing. He looked exhausted and yet strangely whole.
“He woke up once already,” he told me as he approached. “I changed his diaper a little while ago, but he got restless again. I think he was hungry. Can you believe I already learned how to change a diaper? I admit I stepped out into the hallway for a couple of minutes to watch a few videos on how to do it—it’s not that complicated.”
He learned… to change his diaper?
I extended my arms without thinking. It was an instinctive gesture, more animal than reasoned. Elliot understood immediately. He leaned down with a delicacy I still struggled to associate with him and placed the baby in my arms. The weight felt almost unreal. So little, and at the same time so much. I settled him against my chest, pushed the gown aside with still-clumsy hands, and brought him close.
He latched on immediately. I felt the strong, almost stinging pull and couldn’t help but wince.
Elliot noticed.
“Does it hurt?” he asked, lowering his voice even more.
“A little,” I murmured. “At first, yes.”
He crouched beside the bed, watching the baby with absurd concentration, as if he could really negotiate something with a newborn.
“Don’t be so eager,” he told him, almost in a whisper. “Let her breathe.”
The scene would have seemed ridiculous at any other moment. Yet in that state of exhaustion and extreme sensitivity, it made me smile. And, curiously, the pain eased a little. Maybe by chance. Maybe because the body also lets itself be fooled by tenderness when it’s too tired to defend itself.
Elliot looked back at me. He didn’t talk much. He just watched. The way the baby nursed. The way I held him with one hand behind his neck and the other under his body. The way my breathing gradually matched his. I felt watched in a dangerous way, but not uncomfortable. More like naked. Naked in something more intimate than the body. As if he were witnessing a part of me I hadn’t shown anyone.
“Thank you,” I said after a while, not even knowing whether I wanted to thank him or accuse him of something. “For being here. For everything.”
He shook his head, almost annoyed by the idea.
“Don’t thank me. I had to be here.”
The answer came so immediately it disarmed me a little.
“You didn’t have to.”
“Yes, Katherine. Yes, I did. We’re talking about the woman I love and my son.”
I looked up at him. His eyes were dark, tired, completely fixed on me.
“What if he’s not yours?” I asked, because someone had to say it again, even though the words already weighed on me. “What if he’s Andrew’s son?”
He didn’t look away.
“He’s not.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I do.”
His answer irritated me for how simple it was.
“Feeling it isn’t enough,” I said. “We’re not talking about intuition or one of your fantasies. This can be confirmed.”
Something changed in his face then. Not anger. A strange rigidity, a quick shadow.
“I don’t want a test,” he said.
I looked at him in confusion.
“Now you don’t want one? You were the one who insisted most on knowing.”
Elliot rested one hand on the bed near my thigh, the other rising to my face. He stroked my cheek slowly, with that dangerous tenderness that always confuses me more than his hardness.
“Because I no longer need a piece of paper to tell me what I saw last night,” he answered. “I held him in my arms. I looked at him. And I felt the same thing I feel when I look at you. I don’t need anything else.”
The emotion rose in my throat almost violently. I hated myself a little for it.
“I do need to know,” I said. “Because if he’s Andrew’s… everything changes.”
“Nothing changes for me.”
“But it does for me.”
The hardness in my voice made him go still.
“Damn it, Kate,” he whispered. “Don’t do this now.”
“If he’s Andrew’s,” I continued, forcing myself to hold his gaze, “then this ends. Everything. What I feel, what happened, what I thought existed between us. I’ll focus on my son, on my marriage, on my family. And you’ll have to step away. And this time… for real.”
I felt the baby’s pull as he nursed and lowered my eyes for a moment to adjust him better. I didn’t want to keep saying those things, but I had to. Because if I didn’t say them now, in this closed room, with Elliot so close and the child between us, I would never say them.
He took a long time to respond. When he did, his voice came out lower.
“Even if it turns out he’s Andrew’s, I would still love him the same.”
I closed my eyes for a second.
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.”
I looked at him again and there was that intensity of his again, almost unbearable.
“I would love him because he’s yours. Because he comes from you. Because I love you.”
The word hit me with silent violence. Love. Said like that, without drama, without strategy, without his usual need to twist everything with desire or rage. Just love. And that scared me more than any rejection.
“I can’t do this to Andrew,” I whispered, feeling the tears return. “I can’t destroy my family like that if he’s his son.”
Elliot leaned until his forehead rested against mine, with an intimacy that made me close my eyes from sheer exhaustion.
“Your family is already broken if you’re thinking like this,” he murmured.
I shook my head.
“No. Don’t say that. I told you things aren’t that simple—we’re not in the same situation, Elliot. You see it from your side, from the outside… and from inside it doesn’t feel the same.”
The baby released the breast and lay half-asleep against me. Elliot pulled back just enough to look at him, then back at me.
“Do the test, then,” I said, because I needed something in this story to have a clear edge, an answer, an exit. “And if he’s Andrew’s, promise me you’ll walk away. That you’ll let me rebuild what I have left. I’ve already made too many mistakes—I don’t deserve you, I don’t deserve him; all of this makes me feel terribly bad, Elliot.”
“And what does it matter being the villain? What the hell does it matter who carries the blame if in the end love is what wins?” His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried an intensity that made me freeze. “Do you really believe everything has to be clean, correct, perfect? That the world divides between good and bad, between what’s allowed and what isn’t? Kate… life is much dirtier than that. There are paths people don’t like, paths society condemns because they’re afraid to accept them.”
He leaned a little closer, never taking his eyes off mine.
“And you knew it from the beginning. From our first kiss. From the first time you looked at me like you wanted to run and stay at the same time. You knew it when you realized you loved me.”
I swallowed.
“You’re a coward, Kate,” he continued, without softening the word. “But even that I like about you. Because your fear forces me to fight harder. To fight for both of us.”
His silence after those words was long. So long it left me trembling. Finally he nodded slowly.
“All right. We’ll do the test. If the child is Andrew’s… I promise I won’t interfere with your family.”
Then he added, with a calm that raised the hairs on my skin:
“But if he’s mine… then you’ll have to stop deciding alone what happens with our lives.”