My Husband Chose His Mistress Over Our Unborn Daughter

The restaurant was called Margaux. Soft lighting. White tablecloths. A sommelier who moved through the dining room like a ghost. Rhys had chosen it because I'd mentioned it once, months ago, in passing. I didn't remember saying it. But he did. That was how he loved now—through research, through the careful accumulation of data points that substituted for presence.

We sat by the window. Elliott Bay stretched out below us, dark water reflecting city lights. I ordered the halibut. He ordered steak, rare. The server poured wine for him, sparkling water for me. Everything proceeded with the frictionless ease of people who had nothing left to say to each other.

'I was thinking,' Rhys said, cutting into his steak, 'we should take a trip before the baby comes. Somewhere warm. You've been stressed.'

I looked at him. At the way his jaw moved when he chewed. At the small scar above his left eyebrow from a bar fight in our broke years, when he'd been stupid and young and mine.

'I'm fine,' I said.

'You're not sleeping.'

'I sleep.'

'Sariah.' He set down his fork. 'Talk to me.'

I almost laughed. The words were so perfectly, devastatingly wrong. Talk to me. As if the problem was my silence. As if ten years of talking had gotten me anything but this—a table for two, a husband who smelled like someone else, and a baby I would raise alone even if he stayed.

Before I could answer, movement caught my eye. A woman approaching from across the dining room. Honey-blonde hair. A soft pink dress that looked expensive and effortless. Melanie Fox walked toward our table with the kind of hesitant grace that made people want to help her, protect her, give her things.

She stopped three feet away. Her eyes went wide when she saw me—a performance so precise I almost admired it.

'Oh,' she said softly. 'Rhys. I didn't realize you'd be here.'

He went very still. The kind of still that comes before something breaks.

'Melanie.' His voice was flat. A warning she ignored.

'I'm so sorry.' She pressed a hand to her chest, glancing between us. 'I had a reservation, and I saw you, and I just—' She looked at me, her expression shifting into something that might have been sympathy if I didn't know better. 'You must be Sariah. I've heard so much about you.'

I stood. The movement was slow, deliberate. My chair scraped against the floor. Around us, conversations dimmed. People always sense blood before it's drawn.

'Have you.' My voice came out quieter than I expected. Quieter and colder.

Melanie blinked. 'I didn't mean—'

'What did you mean?'

Rhys stood too, his hand reaching for my arm. 'Sariah, sit down.'

I pulled away from his touch. My eyes stayed on Melanie. On the way her fingers twisted together, on the slight tremor in her lower lip. She was good. I'd give her that. She'd built an entire life on this performance, and it had worked for years.

'How old is your son?' I asked.

Something flickered behind her eyes. 'Three.'

'And his father?'

Her mouth opened. Closed. She glanced at Rhys—a mistake, a crack in the facade.

'Sariah.' Rhys's voice had an edge now. 'That's enough.'

'Is it?' I looked at him. At the man I'd taken a knife for. At the stranger who'd replaced him. 'How much is enough, Rhys? Ten years? A miscarriage? A penthouse? How much do I have to give before it's enough?'

Melanie stepped backward. Her heel caught on nothing—or everything, depending on how you measured culpability. She stumbled, her ankle twisting, and she cried out. The sound was sharp, theatrical, designed to pierce through ambient noise and land directly in the most protective part of a man's brain.

It worked.

Rhys moved without thinking. His hand shot out—not to steady me, not to ask if I was okay—but to reach for her. And in reaching, he shoved me aside.

Not hard. He probably didn't even realize he'd done it. But I was pregnant, off-balance, and there was a table behind me.

I went down.

The impact was immediate and wrong. My hip hit the table edge first, then my shoulder, then the floor. Something inside me twisted. Pain bloomed hot and sharp across my abdomen. I heard glass shatter. Someone screamed. The ceiling spun above me, white and distant.

When I opened my eyes, Rhys was gone. I turned my head—slow, everything slow—and saw him at the door, Melanie cradled against his chest like something precious. He didn't look back. Not once.

Warmth spread beneath me. I looked down. Blood soaked through my navy dress, dark and undeniable.

A woman knelt beside me, her face pale. 'Someone call 911,' she shouted. Her hand pressed against my shoulder. 'Stay still. Help is coming.'

I stared at the door where Rhys had disappeared. My hand found my stomach, pressing against the place where our daughter was supposed to be safe.

'Please,' I whispered. Not to the woman. Not to the room. To the small, fragile life I might be losing. 'Please stay.'

Sirens wailed in the distance. The restaurant blurred at the edges. And somewhere beneath the pain, beneath the fear, a single thought crystallized with the clarity of something that had always been true:

I was done.