Chapter 2

I walked out of the exam room unsteady on my feet and nearly ran into a gurney coming the other way. A nurse caught my arm. "Careful, miss."

I thanked her and sat down on a bench at the end of the hallway.

Sunlight came through the glass and fell across my knees, but my hands and feet were cold.

My phone buzzed with a text from my best friend, Emily Grant.

Emily: [How'd the checkup go? Your period's been late forever. Don't scare me.]

I stared at it for several seconds before I slowly typed back: [I'm pregnant.]

Less than ten seconds after I sent it, Emily called. "Wait, what?"

She nearly blew out my eardrum. "You're pregnant? Andrew's?"

"Yeah."

"Hold on. You two are divorced. Where are you right now? The hospital? Don't go anywhere. I'm coming."

I leaned back against the bench and closed my eyes. "Emily, I was planning to end it."

The line went quiet for a moment.

Emily had known me for twelve years, and she knew me too well. I wasn't the kind of woman who would use a baby to keep a man, and I would never use a pregnancy after a divorce to get something out of him.

Emily turned serious. "What did the doctor say?"

"She said my body can't handle an abortion. If I have one, I might never be able to get pregnant again."

This time Emily went completely silent.

A few seconds later, she swore. "What rotten luck."

I laughed, and it came out bitter. "Yeah. Great timing."

"Stay put. I'm on my way."

"Okay."

After I hung up, I put my phone back in my bag and looked at the test results again. It was all there in black and white.

Then I remembered our last fight before the divorce.

That day, Andrew came home from a business trip and found a market research report on baby products in my bag, and his face went cold on the spot.

He asked, "Charlotte, what are you scheming now?"

I stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

He tossed the pages onto the coffee table. "You've been reading up on babies and trusts. You want a kid to lock yourself into this family and take more. Too bad. Even with a kid, you don't get to touch Mason money."

It felt like a knife going into my chest.

None of that material had anything to do with me. I had taken on a campaign for a baby products brand, and I was keeping up with the market.

Andrew didn't bother to ask. He went straight to the verdict.

To him, everything I did came back to scheming for the family money.

After that day, I brought up divorce for the first time.

Thinking about it, I looked down and slowly laid my hand over my still-flat stomach.

I couldn't feel a thing, but a tiny life had already started inside me.

I asked myself whether this child, if I had it, would be born like me, already suspected and schemed against.

Then another thought pushed its way up. Why should that be the child's lot?

If this child was born, a share of the Masons' nearly three billion dollars would be its birthright to begin with.

I wouldn't be the one fighting for it. It belonged to the child by blood.

I didn't want any of it, but that didn't mean the child should have nothing.

A second later, I calmed down. It was far too early to think about any of that.

Once Andrew found out, everything would spin out of control.

He had money, power, and ways of getting what he wanted. If he decided to look into it, I had almost no chance.

More than anything, he would decide that I had gotten pregnant behind his back so I could use the baby as leverage.

I knew exactly how he would think, and the last thing I wanted was to have him look at me that way ever again.

Half an hour later, Emily came tearing into the hospital and spotted me alone on the bench from across the hall.

She walked over and threw her arms around me without a word. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I only found out today."

She let go and looked me up and down. "You look awful. Have you eaten?"

"I'm not hungry."

"Hungry or not, you're eating. Come on, the cafeteria's downstairs."

She tried to pull me up, but I didn't budge.

I said, "Emily."

"Yeah?"

"I've decided to keep the baby."

Emily stared at me for two seconds. "I know."

"You know?"

"If you were planning not to, you wouldn't have sounded like that on the phone."

Nobody knew me better.

She lowered her voice. "But what are you going to do about Andrew?"

I was quiet for a while. "I'm not telling him."

"Are you crazy? You think you can hide something like this?"

"At least for now, he can't know."

I looked at her. "You know what he'll think."

Emily opened her mouth, then let it go, because she knew what Andrew was like too.

He wasn't a bad man. But his guard never came down and his need for control ran bone-deep, and being around that was more suffocating than being around a bad man.

She asked, "So what's your plan?"

"I'm moving." I had already decided. "I'm leaving this city. I'll find somewhere quiet to get through the pregnancy, and we'll figure out the rest after the baby's born."