Chapter 1

My husband abandoned me for another woman while I was in labor with our daughter.

I was seven centimeters dilated when Grant pulled his sleeve from my hand and left the hospital room to take care of Sloan, the childhood friend he had chosen over me throughout our marriage.

Only minutes earlier, he had been holding my hand and promising he would stay until the end.

Then Sloan called.

The epidural was wearing off. Another contraction tore through me as I caught Grant's sleeve.

"Please don't go. I'm scared."

Sloan had grown up next door to Grant. She was also the woman he had chosen to be our daughter's godmother without ever asking me.

At our baby shower a month earlier, Grant had announced it in front of everyone simply because Sloan had laughed and said she had always wanted a daughter.

I pulled him aside and told him we should choose the godmother together.

He asked, "It's just a title. Why do you have to embarrass her?"

In the end, I gave in.

He always did. When Sloan went through a breakup, he left our anniversary dinner to comfort her. When I had a high fever, he made me call a doctor myself because Sloan needed help moving.

Every time, he reminded me that Sloan had no family and that I was his wife, so I should understand.

But this time, I was giving birth to our child.

"She fell off the climbing wall. Her wrist might be fractured." Grant peeled my fingers from his sleeve one by one. "I'll go downstairs, check on her, and be back in twenty minutes."

"She has doctors. She has people from the climbing gym," I said through another contraction. "I'm your wife, and your baby is inside me. Right now, you're all I have."

His phone rang again. He looked at the screen and stood anyway.

"You have doctors and nurses with you. Sloan has no family here. She only has me."

"So I'm supposed to step aside for her again?"

Grant's expression hardened. "You're my wife. You're the last person who should force me to choose between you."

The door closed behind him.

Another contraction tore through me as I stared at my empty hand. To Grant, a wife was not the woman he should choose first. She was the woman who had no right to ask him to choose at all.

Forty minutes later, they wheeled me into the delivery room. A nurse called him twice, but he did not answer. On the third call, I heard Sloan laughing in the background.

"It was only three stitches. You're acting like I'm dying."

I gripped the bed rail. "Grant, the baby is coming."

"They're not finished with her yet. Just listen to the doctors for now."

"I need you."

He paused for a second. "Leona, you'll be fine. She only has me right now."

The nurse took the phone from me and told me to save my strength. The next wave of pain swallowed every sound, along with the twenty minutes Grant had promised me.

When my daughter was born, I was not holding my husband's hand. I was clutching a cold metal rail.

The nurse laid her on my chest and asked if I wanted them to contact the father. I looked at the empty chair beside the door and said no.

Ivy's damp hair clung to her forehead. One tiny hand closed around my hospital gown. Grant did not hear her first cry. When she reached for someone for the first time, it was not her father she found.

I called my younger sister, Maren.

"Where's Grant?" she asked.

"He left halfway through." It was the one time I could not hold back my tears. "Maren, when I'm able to take Ivy out of here, will you come get us?"

Divorce had not even crossed my mind. I had no job, no place of my own, and I was too weak to sit up without help.

I only knew I did not want my daughter to grow up begging a man to stay when he would always choose someone else.

"When?"

I brushed my fingers over my daughter's soft cheek.

"Give me one hundred days."

The hospital room door suddenly opened.

Grant stood there with sweat covering his forehead.

"What's happening in one hundred days?"