My Fiancé Said I Should Thank His Pregnant Mistress

The night before my wedding, I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor of our penthouse, going over the seating chart for the hundredth time. Sixty-two tables. Two hundred and eight guests. I had memorized all of it, but I kept checking anyway. It calmed me down.

The elevator chimed. I figured it was the florist confirming the centerpieces again. Instead, Cataleya Burns walked into my foyer without knocking, wearing a coat I recognized from a shopping trip we'd taken together two years ago, back when I called her my friend.

She was holding something out in front of her like an offering. A pregnancy test. Behind it, pinched between two fingers, a strip of ultrasound photos.

"I'm sorry to do this tonight," she said. She didn't look sorry. She looked like she'd rehearsed the smile in a mirror. "But I'm having Aidan's baby."

I heard him come out of the study before I saw him. Aidan Cox — my fiancé, the man my father had pulled out of a Queens walk-up and built into the CEO of Duncan Enterprises, the man I had loved since I was seventeen years old — stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. No shock on his face. No horror. Just a strange, settled calm, like a man watching weather he'd already checked the forecast for.

"Lilah," he said. "Let's not do this in the hallway."

I didn't move. I looked at him, really looked, the way you look at a stranger's face when you're trying to place where you've seen them before. "How long."

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

He sighed, like I was the one being unreasonable. "You know you can't carry a child, Lilah. You've known since you were sixteen. I'm not saying this to hurt you. I'm saying — this could be a gift. Cataleya's baby could be ours. The heir Duncan Enterprises needs. You should be grateful someone solved a problem you couldn't."

Something in my chest went very still and very cold, like a lake freezing over in one motion. Under the hem of my dress, I pressed my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger, hard enough to leave a crescent. My father was the only person who'd ever noticed that habit. Aidan never had. That told me everything, in the end.

"The wedding's off," I said. Quiet. Even.

Aidan actually smiled. "You don't mean that. You need me in that boardroom tomorrow as much as you need me at the altar." He straightened his cufflinks, the way he always did when he was performing certainty he didn't fully feel. "Sleep on it."

I didn't answer him. I picked up the seating chart, walked to my bedroom, and shut the door.

I went to my father's house that night, needing air that didn't belong to Aidan. When I came back near midnight to collect my things, the penthouse was dark except for a lamp in the bedroom. I pushed the door open and found Cataleya in my bed, wearing my ivory silk robe, scrolling through her phone like she'd lived there for years.

"Oh," she said, not even sitting up. "You're back."

I didn't scream. I didn't cry. I stepped back into the hallway, took out my phone, and called my father.

"Dad." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Strip him of everything. Effective immediately."

There was a pause — three full seconds, long enough that I pictured him standing in his study, remembering a fourteen-year-old boy with a scholarship folder and a mother who cried when he got the acceptance letter.

"Consider it done," Ford Duncan said, and hung up.

I didn't go back inside. I took the stairs down, twelve flights, because I couldn't stand to wait for the elevator with her laughter still in my ears.

The next morning, I was at my desk at Duncan Enterprises before the sun was fully up, before my assistant, before anyone. I opened the journal I'd kept since I was fourteen years old and turned to the last entry — written that same morning, before Cataleya's heels ever touched my marble floor. Hopeful. Small. Embarrassing, almost, in its faith.

I read it once. Then I closed the cover and didn't open it again.

I pressed my palms flat against the desk and breathed until my hands stopped shaking. Then I picked up my phone and typed a message to Elena Vasquez, my chief counsel, the only person I trusted to make this fast and clean.

*I need everything on Aidan Cox by nine a.m. Every asset. Every title. Every access code. We're taking all of it back.*

I hit send before I could talk myself out of the word *all*.