Chapter 1
Chapter 1:
There are moments when the body knows before the mind does. Mine chose to announce its verdict by hurling the contents of my stomach into the toilet the instant Meredith Sloane stepped through my front door.
I’d seen her face before, of course—frozen in time in Nathan’s graduation photos, always hovering at his shoulder like a beautiful afterthought. His friends mentioned her name the way people mention the weather: casually, constantly, as if she were simply a fact of life. “Meredith’s so fragile,” they’d say. “Meredith needs looking after.” I used to find it endearing, the way they all seemed to orbit around this delicate creature. Now, watching her stand in my entryway with a gauze bandage wrapped artfully around her wrist and a look of wounded innocence perfected to an art form, I understood that I had been spectacularly, catastrophically naive.
She radiated something, I’ll give her that. Some women walk into a room and take up space. Meredith walked in and made the room feel like it had been waiting for her all along.
My husband certainly had.
The nausea hit me like a freight train—though to be fair, the nausea had been hitting me like a freight train for about eight weeks now, courtesy of the tiny life currently colonizing my uterus. But this wave felt different. This one tasted like betrayal and stomach acid in equal measure.
𝗙𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 — 𝖙𝖗𝖚𝖘𝖙 gⲁ𝗅𝗇𝗈ν𝖊𝗅𝘀﹐𝖼𝗈𝗺
I didn’t acknowledge them. Couldn’t. I ran past Nathan’s startled expression, past Meredith’s doe-eyed concern, and made it to the bathroom just in time to retch violently into the porcelain bowl. The ring on my left hand—that spectacular two-carat promise Nathan had slipped onto my finger while kneeling in a field of wildflowers—clinked against the toilet seat. The irony was not lost on me.
When I finally lifted my head, the mirror showed me exactly what I expected: bloodshot eyes, skin the color of old paper, and standing behind me, my husband with his brow furrowed in what I once would have called concern. Now I recognized it as inconvenience.
He rubbed his temples. “Meredith hasn’t been feeling well lately. She’ll be staying at the house for a few days p>
A statement. Not a question. Not a discussion. A fact, delivered to me in my own bathroom, while the taste of bile still burned my throat.
I turned on the faucet. Watched the water swirl the remnants of my breakfast down the drain. Said nothing.
What was there to say? That I’d known about them for weeks? That Harper had sent me a photo a month ago—Nathan flying a kite on the beach with a woman whose hair caught the sunlight like spun gold? I’d been two months pregnant then, still dizzy from the double pink lines, still picking at the remnants of the breakfast he’d made me before “heading to work.” I’d defended him so fiercely that Harper had apologized for even suggesting something might be wrong.
He’s probably helping a client, I’d told myself. Maybe some lost tourist couldn’t get her kite airborne.
My mind had become a factory of excuses, running three shifts, working overtime.
The lipstick I found in his car last week—a shade of red I’d never wear—became a colleague’s forgotten property. The gift box beside it, small and velvet, became a present for his mother. I manufactured explanations with the efficiency of someone whose entire reality depended on not seeing the truth.
Ten years. I had loved Nathan Calloway for ten years, since we were seventeen and clumsy and full of the kind of hope that makes you believe love alone is enough. I had believed in him the way some people believe in gravity: absolutely, unquestioningly, as a fundamental law of my universe.
Now he stood in the bathroom doorway, waiting for me to accept yet another lie.
And the worst part? Looking at his face, I could see he expected me to swallow it whole.
I dried my hands slowly. Walked past him without a word.
In the living room, I watched him lead Meredith to the sunny room at the end of the hall—the one with the windows that faced east, the one that caught the morning light like liquid honey. The one I had painted soft yellow three months ago, imagining a crib against the far wall, imagining tiny fingers reaching for the sunbeams.
The nursery.
He was giving her the nursery.