“It is, but it’s a technicality,” he explains. “My mother was an Orlov. She was the elder Maksim’s younger sister. She gave me her name instead of my father’s. They weren’t married, and she was the first Orlov to have a child out of wedlock in… well, probably ever.”
“That’s not so unusual anymore, though. Tons of people have babies before they get married.”
“What’s unusual is that they never got married. If there is a pregnancy in this family, a marriage quickly follows,” he says. “My mother not only had the gall to stay unmarried; she also chose to keep me.”
“Well, she sounds like a badass. I like her already.”
He smiles sadly. “Yeah, I suppose she was.”
“f**k if I know,” he says. “That was another thing she did that Orlov mothers never do: she left me.”
I feel horrible for asking,
