My Fiancé Killed Our Babies for His Mistress

I came back to myself in pieces.

First the cold. Then the hum of an engine. Then Caspian's coat around my shoulders, heavy and dark, smelling like cedar and something expensive I couldn't name.

I was on a stretcher. Outside. The night air hit my face like a slap and I blinked at a sky full of runway lights, orange and white, blurring at the edges the way things blur when your body is still half somewhere else.

I heard voices, low and clipped. Men who moved fast and quiet, the kind who don't explain themselves. One of them had a hand on the stretcher rail. Another was on a phone, two words at a time, nothing wasted.

I didn't ask where we were going. I already knew.

Someone had pressed a burner phone into my palm. Small, cheap, the kind you buy at a bodega. I looked at it for a moment. My thumb was still slow, still heavy from whatever Feld had put in the IV, but it worked well enough.

I opened a new message. Typed Tristan's number from memory, because ten years of a person gets into you whether you want it to or not.

I thought about what to say. I thought about my mother's hand going cold. I thought about the water stain shaped like a fist. I thought about a trip to Capri and a number that was always supposed to be ten.

I typed seven words.

*One month. That's all you have left. Enjoy it.*

I hit send. Then I dropped the phone in the trash bin by the hangar door without looking back.

The jet stairs were in front of me. Caspian was at the top of them, still in his suit, watching me the way a man watches something he has been waiting a long time to stop worrying about. He didn't say anything when they carried me up. He just moved aside, and I was inside, and the door sealed behind us, and New York fell away below like something I'd already finished.

I slept before we reached cruising altitude.

—

Four hours later, in a clinic on the Upper East Side, a door opened onto a stripped bed.

The IV was still running. It dripped onto the linoleum in a slow, steady tick, the only sound in the room. The chart rack on the wall held a single page with Mazie Hicks typed at the top and a clean tear down the middle where the rest had been.

Tristan stood in the doorway in his good suit, the one he wore when he needed to look like a man who had things under control. His right hand was in his breast pocket, fingers closed around a ring box he hadn't opened yet.

He'd rehearsed the apology in the car. He'd rehearsed it three times. It was the first real one he'd tried to put together in three years and he'd wanted to get the words right.

There was no one to say them to.

He called her number. The recording came on before the first ring finished. *The number you have dialed is no longer in service.* He called again. Same recording. He stood there in the empty room and called it six more times, like the answer might change.

He pulled up her Instagram. Gone. Her Twitter. Gone. He texted her Tribeca building's front desk. The doorman picked up on the second ring and told him, voice careful and flat, that Ms. Hicks had vacated the unit that morning. Everything removed. No forwarding address.

Tristan sat down on the stripped mattress. The IV dripped beside him. He read her text again.

*One month. That's all you have left. Enjoy it.*

He read it again. And again. He read it until the words stopped looking like words and started looking like something else, something with weight and edges, something that had already happened and couldn't be walked back.

By the fortieth time, his hand was shaking.

By the seventy-first, the sky outside the clinic window had gone pale gray with early morning, and he still hadn't moved, and the ring box was still in his pocket, and the IV beside him had finally run dry.

He did not sleep that night. Or the next. Or the one after that.

He went home to the Tribeca apartment and stood in the doorway of the room that had been hers and found it bare. No clothes. No perfume on the vanity. No small worn things that accumulate around a person who has lived somewhere long enough to believe it's safe.

She had taken everything.

She had left him nothing to hold onto, nothing to beg in front of, nothing to prove to himself that she had ever really been there at all.

Forty thousand feet above the Atlantic, wrapped in a borrowed coat, I was already asleep.

I did not dream about him once.