Chapter 1
My husband kissed my forehead in front of eighty people while his mistress's ultrasound lit up on the phone in my hand. BABY BELL — 18 WEEKS glowed across the screen, and for one second I forgot how to breathe.
"Sienna?" Dante Moretti murmured, his hand tightening around my waist.
"Smile," Dante added.
So I smiled at him on our seventh anniversary while the chandeliers shone above our guests, then slipped his secret phone into my purse.
"To my wife," Dante announced, lifting his champagne glass with the warmth that had fooled me for years.
"The woman who gave up everything to stand beside me," he continued.
My best friend Tessa Bell stood three feet away, blinking back tears as everyone applauded. Six months earlier, when she said she had nowhere to live, I had welcomed her into our guesthouse; now she was eighteen weeks pregnant with my husband's baby.
Neither of them knew I was eleven weeks pregnant too. My own ultrasound waited in a tiny gift box beside his phone, after two failed IVF cycles and a miscarriage I had barely survived.
When the doctor had shown me this new heartbeat, I had asked her to print two copies because Dante always lost the things I wanted him to keep. One copy was folded in my bedside drawer; the other had traveled through the party in my purse, waiting for a moment that no longer existed.
Five minutes earlier, Dante's niece Lily had handed me the black phone because it kept making noises. I had expected business calls and found Tessa instead: her message said she could not hide her belly much longer, and Dante's reply promised he would handle me after the holidays.
Across the ballroom, Tessa touched Dante's chest and laughed as he bent to whisper in her ear. His hand settled on her back with a practiced intimacy that made every affectionate gesture he had given me feel suddenly rehearsed.
She had stood beside me at the clinic after my miscarriage, holding my coat while I cried in a hallway too bright to bear. I had let her know the names we once considered for our children, and now her secret ultrasound carried the same surname as the man who had comforted us both.
I opened the message thread beneath the table. Tessa wanted his assurance that I would not cause trouble, and Dante had replied that I knew what happened when people embarrassed him.
Three weeks earlier, Dante had casually asked whether I would help Tessa if she ever had a child. I had said of course, believing he was complimenting my kindness when he called me good at caring for people.
He had been preparing me to raise his mistress's baby. I thought of the injections I had taken alone, the child we had lost, and the new heartbeat growing inside me while he planned another woman's future.
Dante stepped close enough to touch my cheek, still wearing the husbandly expression that had made every guest applaud him.
"You're pale," Dante said, studying me with dark eyes that had made armed men lower theirs.
"Are you all right?" Dante asked.
"Too much champagne," I told him, although my glass was untouched. His gaze dropped to it, and I smiled before he could turn that small lie into an interrogation.
I said I needed the bathroom, but Dante caught my wrist with a grip that looked loving from across the room, and I smiled while every guest mistook the pressure for affection.
"Don't disappear," Dante murmured.
"I have another surprise for you," Dante added.
I looked from him to Tessa and felt the gift box press against his secret phone in my purse. He had a surprise for me; I had one for him too, but he was not going to receive mine tonight.