The Betrayal That Set Me Free,A Billionaire's Wife Walks Away

The day Claude Delgado stood me up for the ninety-ninth time, I went to the class reunion alone. Again.

"Marlene Pruitt, how come you never bring our campus heartthrob to these things?"

"What's the deal? Still hiding him away like you did back in college, scared someone might steal him?"

At the reunion, plenty of people asked about him.

I forced a smile that didn't reach my eyes. "His company's been swamped. It's crunch time. He couldn't get away."

A chorus of sympathetic murmurs rippled across the table. Some bought it, some didn't.

Honestly, neither did I.

My friend sitting next to me leaned in close and lowered his voice. "Marley, are you and Claude still not planning on having kids?"

"I mean, you've been married five, six years now..."

I didn't understand. I frowned and cut him off. "What do you mean?"

"Claude came to our hospital last week for a vasectomy. You didn't know about this?"

——

"A vasec...tomy?"

The two words scraped through my throat like grains of sand, dry and raw and agonizing.

Brendan Matthews took one look at my face and realized he'd said something he shouldn't have.

He scrambled to backtrack. "Maybe I was wrong. I was pretty far away that day. Could've been someone else..."

But I couldn't hear a single word anymore.

My nails dug into my palms. I stared blankly at the wine glass in front of me. "What day?"

"What?"

"I said what day did you see Claude at the hospital."

Brendan knew no amount of explaining would help now. He pulled out his phone and checked his shift schedule. "Last Sunday at two. I was just switching shifts."

"He came alone."

It matched.

Last Sunday was our wedding anniversary. That evening around nine-thirty, I'd called him.

He said he was on a business trip and probably wouldn't be back until Wednesday.

So the "business trip" was a vasectomy he'd hidden from me, and Wednesday was his discharge date.

A bitter ache flooded through me, twisting my heart until it hurt to breathe.

Claude and I had been together for ten years. A decade of dating, six years of marriage. For all six of those years, we'd been trying to conceive.

He used to cup my face in his hands and say, "Marley, I want a baby that looks just like you so badly."

"But why can't we ever get pregnant?"

Over those six years, we'd been to every hospital, run every test. Neither of us had any issues.

And still, no baby.

To keep Claude from feeling pressured, I always told him we should let nature take its course. But deep down, I wanted a child more than anything.

I racked my brain and still couldn't fathom it. Why would Claude get a vasectomy?

The rest of that dinner tasted like cardboard. My stomach churned the entire time.

Halfway through, I made an excuse about something urgent at home and rushed out.

The moment I got back, I tore the apartment apart looking for any trace of a hospital visit.

I finally found it in the study's wastebasket: a hospital admission form dated last Friday, listing post-vasectomy care instructions.

I sat in the living room, staring at the crumpled slip of paper on the table.

The urge to call Claude and demand answers reached a boiling point.

The number you have dialed is temporarily unavailable...

Every single call. Rejected.

My mind drifted back to that afternoon, when Claude had bailed on me at the last minute.

"Marley, I have to go out with Ms. Vance tonight to discuss a contract. Just go to the reunion by yourself."

When Claude had come to the design department to tell me that, my mood had already hit rock bottom.

I couldn't even count how many times he'd done this. Canceled on me at the last second, always with the same excuses: overtime, contract negotiations, client dinners.

Claude had gone from being genuinely apologetic in the beginning to treating it like it was simply expected. And I had gone from accepting it willingly to dreading every time my phone buzzed with his name.