Faking My Death to Escape My Billionaire Husband

After he came out from my prenatal checkup with me, Marvin Harding pressed two coins into my hand and told me to take the bus home.

"Charlene Henson, I can't let you bring bad luck onto Nora Galloway and her baby."

I was startled, thrown. "Who's Nora?"

His eyes slid away from mine, but he still reached slowly into the car and pulled out a photo of himself with another girl, her belly round with pregnancy.

"Five years ago, you got taken by the kidnappers because you saved me, and you were gone three months. Nora was the one who got me through all that pain."

"She's not like you. She's clean. And she doesn't even want a title. You can't really expect me to spend my whole life chained to a woman who lost her virtue, dragging around this guilt..."

My head filled with a roaring hum, my voice shaking so badly it barely held together. "What do you mean, a woman who lost her virtue?"

His tone was apologetic, innocent. "What more do you want?"

"I already married you. I'm willing to take care of you for the rest of your life. Call that my way of paying you back..."

"If you can't let go, you can always find some man on the side to make do. Just don't wrong yourself. Don't go getting knocked up by someone else and lose it again."

On the back seat were the little baby clothes we'd picked out for our child at the mall that morning.

Now they were like needle points, driving hard into the marrow of my bones.

Trembling, I crushed the checkup slip in my hand into a wad.

Five years ago, when Marvin and I had just started dating, we were seized together by kidnappers demanding ransom. I was the one who risked my life, biting through the ropes so I could get out and run for help first.

Three months later, he'd come with people and found me where I'd fled the kidnappers and hidden deep in the mountains. He'd held my hand and wept, swearing he would treat me well for the rest of his life.

But now, the same man who'd hauled me back from the cliff's edge had shoved me into hell with his own hands.

So the salvation and the true love I'd believed in were nothing but a trap he'd set, by hand, for another woman.

1.

I wanted to get away, but I caught my foot on my skirt and fell to the ground.

Marvin saw me lying there in a spread of blood, his eyes going red with distress.

"Sweetheart, are you and the baby okay?"

He lifted my still-bleeding leg with great care and blew on it gently. "Sweetheart, let me get you to the hospital and have this bandaged."

But I couldn't help laughing even as the tears fell.

How much he loved me. He could turn this tender over such a small scrape of mine.

Yet all these years, while he was behind my back getting another woman pregnant, while he was with her, he'd never once thought of me, his wife.

Marvin's sincerity had always been an act, and I'd let myself be fooled for five whole years.

I pushed his hand away and said, "I'm fine."

"You've got time for this, you should go be with your Nora instead."

But he wouldn't drop it, sweeping me up into his arms and carrying me to the hospital.

I looked at the familiar hospital. Every checkup, every blood draw, I'd been so afraid, always needing Marvin there with me.

This time I noticed he stayed fixed on his phone screen the whole while, a doting smile at the corner of his mouth.

And suddenly I let it all go.