My Husband Chose His Mistress Over Our Unborn Baby

The nightmare came back Tuesday night, different this time. Not the staircase. Something older.

I was seventeen, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching my father drag a mattress up the stairs by himself because the boy wouldn't let him help. Stefan was fourteen then. Scrawny, furious, a bruise yellowing under one eye that nobody asked about. My father set the mattress down and said, "This is your room now," like it was nothing. Like he hadn't just spent four months fighting a caseworker for the right to say it.

Stefan didn't say thank you. He just sat on the bare mattress and stared at the wall until we left him alone.

The dream skipped forward the way dreams do. Sunday mornings, years later, in our first apartment — Stefan at the stove before I woke up, steam curling off a teapot, the smell of jasmine drifting under the bedroom door. He'd bring it to me in bed and say, "I read that you're supposed to bring it before she opens her eyes. Better luck." I never asked why he thought that mattered so much. I just drank it and loved him for trying.

Then the dream turned, the way it always does now.

His voice, flat, in a parked car outside a clinic I didn't want to enter. "A baby right now would destroy everything we've built, Wren. You know that." My hands in my lap, shaking, not from cold. The receptionist's clipboard. The paper gown. My hands shaking again in the parking lot after, and Stefan's hand on the back of my neck, warm, steady, like comfort, like nothing had happened at all.

Then a hotel receipt in a jacket pocket, months later, a name I didn't recognize, a date I remembered too well. A downtown address I drove to on a Tuesday afternoon because some small stupid hope in me needed to be wrong.

A boy's face in the doorway. Twelve years old. Already looking at me like he knew exactly who I was and exactly what I was in the way of.

I woke up at four with my jaw aching from clenching it in my sleep.

---

Stefan was at the café when I walked in Thursday morning. I almost turned around. I didn't, because turning around would have meant he still had that kind of power over where I went.

He stood when he saw me, too fast, knocking the edge of the table. Two cups sat across from each other. Steam rising off both.

"I know you didn't ask," he said. "I just — I was already here. I thought—"

I sat down because standing felt like giving him something.

He pushed one of the cups toward me. "Jasmine," he said, like I couldn't smell it already, like the smell hadn't hit me the second I walked through the door and made my stomach turn over on itself before my mind caught up.

I looked at the cup. Pale gold liquid, a few petals floating on top. Sunday mornings. Steam under a bedroom door. A version of myself that used to smile at that smell.

My hand moved before I told it to. I pushed the cup away, harder than I meant to, and some of it slopped over the rim onto the saucer.

Stefan went still.

"Wren—"

"I'm allergic to jasmine now," I said.

I didn't look at him when I said it. I looked at the cup, at the small brown stain spreading across the white saucer.

"Since when," he said, and his voice had gone thin.

"Since the facility." I said it the way I'd report a lab result. Clinical. Unhurried. "They used to bring it on a cart in the evenings. Some idea about calming the patients before lights out." I finally looked up. "My body decided it didn't want anything else that reminded it of that room. Turns out you don't get to pick."

He stared at me. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"Doctor called it psychosomatic," I added, because the silence needed filling and I didn't want him to be the one to fill it. "Doesn't matter what you call it. My throat closes. My eyes water. It's real enough."

"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know they—"

"You didn't ask," I said. "You signed the paperwork. There's a difference between not knowing and not asking, Stefan, and I stopped being generous about the difference a long time ago."

I stood. My chair scraped against the floor, loud in the quiet café.

"Wren, please, just—"

"The woman who liked jasmine tea doesn't live here anymore," I said. "I don't know how many more ways I can tell you that."

I walked out. The bell over the door rang behind me, bright and stupid and cheerful.

I didn't look back through the window. I didn't need to. I already knew what he'd look like — sitting there with two cups going cold, one poured for a woman who no longer existed, and one he hadn't touched because some part of him already understood, for the first time, that he was drinking tea alone with a ghost.