Chapter 2
I followed their car through the rain.
Twenty minutes later, it stopped outside a private women's clinic in Back Bay.
The sign above the entrance made my stomach tighten.
OB-GYN.
I stayed inside my car.
If Tristan saw me, everything would end before I understood what was happening.
So I watched.
He got out first and walked around the Mercedes. He opened Sloane's door, offered her his hand, then placed his palm against her back as they crossed the pavement.
I remembered that hand.
After my first miscarriage, Tristan had kept it around mine through an entire night at the hospital.
After the second, he had slept beside my bed.
By the third, he had been too busy to come to the follow-up appointment.
A few months later, when I nearly fainted at a charity dinner, he told me to call an Uber because he was speaking to investors.
Now he had flown home from London and personally escorted Sloane into an obstetrician's office.
He hadn't forgotten how to take care of someone.
He had simply stopped doing it for me.
I raised my phone and took a picture.
Then another.
Sloane turned toward him. Tristan leaned down and said something I couldn't hear.
She touched her stomach.
My heart stopped.
Pregnant.
Was she carrying his child?
Had he spent six weeks in London because of her?
Was that why he had lied to me so calmly?
My hand moved instinctively to my own stomach.
Seven weeks.
My baby was still so small.
I had lost three babies trying to build a family with Tristan. Was he already building one with her?
I looked at the passenger seat beside me. The white roses lay there, their petals bruised from my grip. The ultrasound report still peeked between the stems.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I whispered. I was sorry that I had brought this child into a marriage where its father might already have chosen someone else.
I stayed in the car for almost forty minutes.
When Tristan finally came out, his expression was tense. Sloane looked pale.
He immediately placed his hand against her back and guided her toward the car.
I took another photograph.
I didn't need to know everything yet.
I only needed enough to protect myself.
When their car disappeared into traffic, I drove home.
I spread everything across the dining table.
Airport photographs.
Messages.
The license plate.
Pictures from outside the clinic.
Six months of lies.
Then I called my old college roommate, Belika, one of Boston's most experienced family-law attorneys.
“Lenora?” she answered. “What’s wrong?”
“Belika, I need to understand the process for getting a divorce.”
There was a brief silence.
“Are you safe?”
“Yes.”
“Then come see me tomorrow afternoon.”
“I will.”
We agreed on a time.
I backed up every photograph and message to a private account, then sat alone in the dark kitchen.
At 11:48 p.m., Tristan texted me.
The airline arranged a hotel for me. I'm exhausted. Missing you.
An hour later, the front door opened.
Tristan walked inside.
He looked at me and froze.
“Lenora?”
“I thought your flight was delayed.”
He hesitated.
Then he smiled.
“I got lucky. They found me another flight.”
He walked over and kissed my cheek.
The faint scent of Sloane's perfume still clung to his collar.
“I wanted to surprise you,” he whispered.
For one terrible second, I remembered the boy who had once waited outside my college dorm in the snow because I had a fever and he didn't want me to be alone.
I had loved that boy for years.
I no longer knew the man standing in my kitchen.
Still, I smiled back.
“You really did.”