After My Husband Proposed to His Pregnant Mistress

Anders didn't call me. He never called when he was doing something for me — he just did it, quietly, and I'd find out later, or sometimes never.

But I know him well enough now to imagine how that Tuesday went.

His office is on the forty-second floor of a building on Sixth Avenue, all glass and clean lines, the kind of place where silence costs money. I picture him at his desk — jacket on, always jacket on, even at nine at night — with a cup of coffee gone cold at his elbow and a stack of documents spread in front of him that had nothing to do with any of his actual clients.

The Hudson Group corporate charter. My father's original Taylor Enterprises founding documents, the ones filed in 1994 with Robert Taylor's signature on every page in that big, looping hand I used to trace with my finger when I was small.

And the divorce papers. Already drafted. Already sitting in his drawer like a fire extinguisher behind glass — not because he wanted the fire, but because he'd promised himself I would never be the last one in the room without a way out.

I don't know exactly when he first wrote them. I've never asked. I think I'm afraid the answer will make me cry in a way I'm not ready for yet.

What I do know is that while Nicholas was at dinner in Tribeca with Laila's fingers around a wine glass, Anders was recalibrating every clause to current company valuation. Share distribution. Board voting rights. The specific percentage that, if structured correctly, would give me back the name on the door.

He didn't text me. He didn't position himself as anything. He just made sure the parachute was packed.

---

The charity gala was at the Mandarin Oriental. Forty-seventh floor, the whole city spread out below like something that belonged to us.

It used to feel that way. It didn't anymore.

I wore black — a Valentino I'd bought three months ago for exactly this kind of evening, before everything. Nicholas was in his element, working the room, his hand finding the small of my back in the automatic way of a man who knows the gesture reads well in photographs. I smiled for the cameras. I always smiled for the cameras. It was the one skill this life had perfected in me.

Laila arrived forty minutes late, which meant every head in the room turned at once.

The gown was red. Of course it was red. Backless, structured at the shoulders, engineered for exactly one purpose — to make every lens in the room swing toward her and stay there. I watched Nicholas's jaw shift, just slightly, before he caught himself and looked back at the investor he was talking to.

I watched that, too.

She found me during cocktail hour. I almost admired the precision of it — she waited until Nicholas was across the room, until the cluster of people around me had drifted toward the bar, until there was a column between us and the nearest photographer. Then she materialized at my elbow like she'd been there all along.

"You look tired," she said. Her voice was soft, almost kind. The voice she used for interviews.

I sipped my sparkling water. "Laila."

"He came to my apartment last night." She didn't look at me when she said it. She looked out at the room, at the skyline, perfectly composed. "We talked for a long time. He said —" she paused, like she was being careful with something fragile — "he said he feels trapped. His word, not mine."

I didn't move.

"He wants to file," she continued. "He's just waiting until after the IPO. The optics, you know. He doesn't want the story to be about the divorce." A small smile. "It's always about the optics with him, isn't it."

Something happened inside my chest then. Not a crack — it was quieter than that. More like a door swinging shut on its own weight, the latch clicking into place without any force at all.

"Thank you for telling me," I said.

She blinked. That wasn't the response she'd rehearsed for.

I set my glass on a passing tray and walked back across the room to where Nicholas stood. He saw me coming and opened his arm, and I stepped into it, and I took his hand for the photographer who materialized on cue, and I smiled — the same smile I'd been giving cameras for ten years, the one that looked warm from a distance.

Nicholas leaned down. "You okay? You were gone a while."

"Fine," I said. "Just getting some air."

He squeezed my hand and turned back to his conversation.

I stood beside him for another two hours. I laughed at the right moments. I remembered everyone's names. I was, by any measure, a perfect wife.

And somewhere across the city, in an office on the forty-second floor, Anders Bailey was making sure I would never have to be again.