After My Husband Proposed to His Pregnant Mistress

The waiting room smelled like lavender hand sanitizer and old magazines. I sat in a blue chair, touching the ring on my finger, turning it around and around. It was a habit. Nicholas never noticed it, not once in ten years. I'd been doing it since the morning after my parents died, when nothing else in the world felt solid.

My phone buzzed. A push notification, red and loud.

*Hudson Group CEO's Secret Aspen Proposal.*

I almost didn't open it. I thought maybe it was a mistake, some other Hudson, some other CEO. Then I saw the photo. Snow. Pine trees. Nicholas on one knee, his tux jacket dark against the white ground, sliding a ring onto Laila Ramirez's finger. She had her hand pressed to her mouth like she was surprised. Twelve million views.

I didn't feel my body stand up. I just noticed, a second later, that I was standing. The receptionist called my name — *Mrs. Hudson, the doctor's ready* — and I told her something had come up. My voice came out steady. That surprised me more than the photo did.

I drove to Hudson Group with both hands on the wheel, ten and two, the way my dad taught me in the church parking lot when I was fifteen.

His office used to be my father's office. The desk was the same one, dark walnut, and my father's photo still sat on the corner of it — Robert Taylor, laughing at something off-camera, like he'd known all along how this would go. I used to think Nicholas kept that photo out of love. That morning I wasn't sure of anything.

"Emersyn." Nicholas stood up too fast, then slowed himself down, straightened his cufflinks. He always did that before he lied to me. I just hadn't known it yet. "You shouldn't have driven here. You have an appointment."

"I saw the photo." I held up my phone. "Twelve million people saw it before I did."

He glanced at the screen, barely, and waved a hand like he was swatting a fly. "That's a PR stunt. Winter campaign for the brand. Laila's people set it up months ago."

"You proposed to her. On camera. In the snow."

"It's staged, Em. It's not real." His voice was smooth, patient, the voice he used on nervous investors. "You're overreacting."

"Which brand?" I asked. "Who approved it? Why wasn't I told?"

He didn't answer that. Instead, he moved — just a small step, but enough. He put himself between me and the door to the adjoining suite, the one with Laila's name on a gold plate. Like I was the one who might do something wrong.

A board call pulled him away ten minutes later. The second the door shut, Laila stepped out of that suite like she'd been waiting behind it the whole time.

Gone was the soft, wounded look from the magazines. She smiled at me, slow and pleased with herself. "Three months," she said, patting her flat stomach. "His baby. You should really know your place, Emersyn."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out that mattered.

Then she screamed.

She dropped to the floor so fast I barely saw it happen, clutching her stomach, wailing. Staff came running from every direction. Nicholas burst back through the door, and I watched his eyes go straight to her, only her, like I wasn't standing three feet away. He scooped her up like she weighed nothing and carried her to the elevator.

He didn't look at me once.

The doors closed. I stood there in the hallway, my hand pressed low on my stomach, and felt something warm and wrong.

I drove myself to the OB-GYN. Stress-induced spotting, the doctor said. The pregnancy was still there. Barely. She used that word twice — *barely* — and told me bed rest, no stress, absolutely no stress, not in the first trimester.

Nicholas came home that night smelling like a perfume that wasn't mine. He dropped his keys on the counter and rubbed his temples like he was the one who'd had a hard day.

"You made a scene," he said. "I spent the whole afternoon managing the fallout."

"Nicholas, I was bleeding."

"You need to relax." He didn't ask if I was okay. He didn't ask about the baby at all. He walked past the nightstand where my prenatal vitamins sat, six inches from his phone charger, and he didn't see them. He never saw them.

I turned toward the wall and lay very still in the dark, my hand on my stomach, and understood — really understood, for the first time in ten years — that the man beside me hadn't truly looked at me in a very long time.