Page 22 of Nine Months to Love

More silence. I hear him shift, maybe leaning against the door. When he speaks again, his voice is softer. “I’m not going anywhere, Olivia. Whenever you’re ready, I’m here.”

His footsteps retreat down the hall. I wait until I’m sure he’s gone before reaching for the one thing I managed to keep hidden—the journal Natalia pressed into my hands before Stefan’s men arrived. It’s heavy, leather-bound, edges worn soft from years of handling. Matvey Safonov’s journal.

I shouldn’t read it. It’s probably another lie, the latest and greatest of them, carefully selected to paint Stefan in the worst light.

But I need distraction from the chaos in my head, and maybe understanding his father will help me understand him.

Sometimes, even a pretty lie is better than a hideous truth.

Matvey’s handwriting is thin, faint, nothing like Stefan’s sharp slashes. The early pages are surprisingly philosophical—musings on the nature of ambition, observations about the passage of time. One entry catches me, spiraling from watching a caterpillar in its cocoon into a meditation on transformation:

“We think metamorphosis is beautiful, but inside that chrysalis, the caterpillar dissolves completely. It becomes nothing before it becomes something new. Perhaps that is what we fear most about change—not the ending, but the in-between. The moment when we are neither what we were nor what we will become.”

I get sucked into Matvey Safonov’s world, finding myself unexpectedly connected to this man I’ve never met. He writes with surprising vulnerability about his struggles, his doubts, the weight of the empire he’s building. There’s poetry in hisobservations. A gentleness that seems at odds with what Stefan’s told me about him.

Then Natalia appears in the pages, and everything shifts.

The poetic handwriting becomes erratic. Sentences fragment. One entry just repeats her name over and over down the margin. When coherent thoughts return, they’re raw with regret:

“I loved her wrong. I loved her the only way I knew how—hideously and violently. In order to earn her love, I turned into a monster who demanded it. I should have known that true love is given freely, not forcefully.”

I read that line again. And again. The words blur as tears threaten. It’s too close to home, too much like Stefan’s grip on me. What’s that thing my high school teacher used to say? “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

The entries grow darker. Matvey writes about paranoia. He starts to suspect Natalia of sneaking around on him. Lies and conspiracies sprout like weeds. Then comes the revelation that stops my breath:

“She lost a child because of me. MY temper, MY fists, MY need to control everything around me. The doctor said it was stress, trauma to the abdomen. He didn’t need to say more. We both knew whose fault it was.”

My hand moves instinctively to my own stomach. The baby Stefan and I created shifts slightly, a flutter that’s becoming more frequent.

“She wanted to leave then. She would have—but I wouldn’t let her go. I told myself it was love. That wasa lie. It was fear. Fear of being alone and facing what I’d become.”

Another entry, weeks or months later:

“It was not her that ended our marriage. It was me. Every blow I struck, every threat I made, every time I chose control over compassion—I was the one destroying us. She simply survived it. And when she finally fought back, when she finally chose herself over me, I cannot blame her. I can only blame myself for making her into someone capable of such choices.”

I set the journal aside and close my eyes. I’d wanted a villain, someone clear to blame. Instead, I find only sadness. Two broken people breaking each other further. A cycle of violence and manipulation that created Stefan, shaped him into the man currently pacing somewhere in this house.

Whose fault is that? Whose fault is anything?

I can’t hate Natalia—a woman who lost a child to her husband’s violence, who spent years trapped in a loveless, toxic marriage.

I can’t hate Matvey—a man aware of his monstrosity but unable to change it, writing his regrets in private pages no one was meant to read.

And if there’s no true villain, who do I hate? More urgently—who do I choose?

The journal draws me back in. Later entries focus almost entirely on Stefan. The margins fill with his name.

“More and more, he reminds me of myself. The way I used to be, before I was punished by my hubris. He has my temper and my endless suspicions. But alsoNatalia’s cunning, her ability to survive. What will he become, this son of mine? Which parent will win out in his blood?

I see him watching us. Learning. Every ugly thing that comes out of our mouths, he absorbs it all. God forgive me, I’m creating a monster to inherit my monstrous empire.”

The final entry I can bring myself to read:

“Stefan asked me today if I love his mother. I told him love is for weak men. The truth is I love her to madness. Isn’t that love? Wanting someone so badly that you’d consume them just to keep them closer? If that’s not, what is?

Someday, someone will love him the same way.

God help them both when that day comes.”