Chapter 1

At thirty-six weeks pregnant, I stood outside my husband's dad-to-be party and listened as he told his friends that once the baby arrived, I would no longer have the strength to leave him.

On the other side of the country club's half-open patio door, the men's laughter drowned out the music.

I was holding a cake that read, "Ready, Daddy?" My fingers dug into the edge of the cardboard box.

I had driven halfway across town to pick it up. That very morning, Grant had wrapped his arms around me and said it was just a few guys drinking beer and watching the game. He had told me to get some sleep and not wait up.

"Aren't you worried Hannah will find out?" Ryan asked.

"Find out what?" Grant sounded completely at ease. "Brooke helped throw me a party. That's all."

Another round of laughter rose from the patio.

Someone said, "She did a little more than order a few cases of beer."

A woman tapped her glass lightly against someone else's.

Through the gap in the door, I saw Brooke sitting beside Grant in a silver slip dress. She was the only woman there, and she was also the coworker Grant described as "newly divorced and really in need of a friend right now."

Grant did not deny it.

He only laughed. "I'm not planning to leave Hannah. Home is home, and Brooke is Brooke. Why does everyone insist on mixing the two?"

"Because your wife's about to have a baby," another man reminded him. "Women start watching their husbands even more closely once they have kids."

"Actually, it's the opposite," Grant said. "Once the baby's here, she won't even have time to sleep. She'll need me. She'll need the house. She'll need us to look like a family. She waited three years for this baby. She isn't going to let our son grow up without a father over a few rumors she can't prove."

Our son shifted inside me, as if someone had gently knocked from the other side of my skin.

Three years ago, Grant told me he wanted a baby with me.

I gave up coffee. I tracked every cycle. I took the pills and the injections. I endured two failed attempts largely on my own.

In his eyes, none of that was proof of what I had given our family.

It was the rope he believed would keep me tied to him.

"What about the twenty-week anatomy scan?" Ryan asked. "Didn't you almost get caught that day?"

"I told her a client's heating system had gone out." Grant laughed. "Hannah cried at the doctor's office, then came home and warmed up dinner for me."

Brooke finally spoke. "When you came to the hotel that day, you never told me she was at an ultrasound."

"Would you have let me into your room if I had?"

I heard a quick kiss from inside, followed by cheers and whistles.

I did not open the door.

I set the cake on a service table against the wall, braced one hand against my lower back, and pulled my phone from my coat pocket.

The recording had reached seven minutes and forty-three seconds.

I had only meant to record Grant's friends offering their good wishes so our son could hear them when he was older.

Now, every passing second was preserving something else: how my husband had missed an ultrasound, how his friends had helped him lie, and how certain he was that pregnancy had taken away my ability to fight back.

Before I left, I heard Grant raise his glass.

"To the little guy on his way, and to my last few weeks of freedom."

I stopped the recording.

I did not cry.

Rain streaked the windshield on the drive home.

For the first time, I did not think about how to save my marriage.

I thought only about what I needed to take back from Grant before our son was born.