My Fiancé Killed Our Babies for His Mistress

The stick had two pink lines. I stared at it for so long the bathroom light started to hum in my ears.

Ten. This was the tenth time.

I didn't cry right away. I just sat on the edge of the tub in our Tribeca apartment, holding the test like it might dissolve if I gripped it too hard.

When I told Tristan, he came home early. He never came home early. He knelt in front of me in the kitchen, still in his suit, and took both my hands like he was afraid I'd pull them back.

"This one stays," he said. "I swear it on my life, Mazie. This one stays."

I wanted to believe him so badly my chest hurt. "You said that the last two times."

"I know." His thumb ran over my knuckles, over the small scars only I could see. "This time it's different. I'll tell my mother myself. I'll tell everyone."

I let myself believe him. For forty-eight hours, I let myself believe him completely.

I bought a onesie at a boutique in SoHo, pale yellow with a duck stitched on the collar, and I held it up to the light in the store like it was made of something precious. I called my mother's room at the ICU, pressed the phone to my ear even though she couldn't answer, and whispered the news into the machines keeping her alive. "You're going to be a grandmother," I told her monitor. "Just hold on."

That night I cried in the shower, water running down my face so Tristan wouldn't see. It wasn't sadness. It was something I didn't have a name for anymore — gratitude, maybe, for a promise I hadn't had to fight for.

Two nights later, we went to a gala at the Whitney. Chandeliers, string quartet, a room full of people who smiled at me like I mattered again.

I saw Leighton Salazar across the room in a black dress that made her look carved out of shadow. She found Tristan by the bar. I watched her tilt her face up, watched one single tear slide down her cheek — perfectly, theatrically alone — and she said something to him. I was too far to hear the words. I only found out later, from a text message meant for someone else, what those eleven words were.

*You always forget me the second she's carrying something of yours.*

I watched Tristan's face change. His jaw tightened. His eyes went flat and far away, the way they did right before he stopped being the man who knelt in the kitchen and became the man who didn't look at me at all.

He didn't come find me that night. He didn't explain anything. The next morning, his assistant, a thin woman named Renata with a clipboard voice, knocked on our bedroom door.

"Ms. Hicks," she said. "The car is downstairs."

"What car?"

"Mr. Bell asked me to take you to the clinic. The one on the Upper East Side." She said it the way she might say *the dry cleaner's*. "Same as before."

I didn't fight this time. I'd learned that fighting only made the restraints tighter.

Dr. Marcus Feld was waiting when I arrived, in a white coat, his glasses pushed up on his head like he was in the middle of something ordinary. He'd done this nine times. He knew my body better than a husband should.

"You fought last time," he said, buckling the strap around my left wrist without meeting my eyes. "We're not doing that again."

"Where's Tristan?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

No one answered. Through the half-open door, I could see him in the corridor, one shoulder against the wall, thumb scrolling his phone. He didn't look up. An email pinged. He answered it.

I stopped asking.

Lying there, strapped down, staring at the ceiling tile with its water stain shaped like a fist, I felt something in me go very quiet. Not calm. Quiet the way a house is quiet after everyone in it has already left.

I worked my right hand loose from the buckle — Feld had rushed, hadn't checked it twice — and reached for my coat folded on the chair beside the table. My fingers found my phone in the pocket. I didn't think. I typed with my thumb, letters blurring.

*Yes. I'll marry you. Get me out.*

I sent it to Caspian Bell.

Forty blocks south, in a glass conference room on the fortieth floor of a building I'd never see, Caspian was three sentences into closing a nine-figure deal when his phone lit up on the table. He read it once. He didn't ask to be excused. He didn't apologize.

He simply stood, buttoned his jacket, and walked out — leaving eleven men in silence, and a woman on an operating table forty blocks away who had just, for the first time in a decade, told the truth about what she wanted.