The pencil had gone soft in my hand, and I still hadn't gotten the drape of the skirt right. I erased the hemline for the third time and tried again. The fabric needed to look like it was moving, but at ten at night, my tired eyes and uncooperative hands weren't helping.

The doorbell rang, and I groaned out loud, dropping my pencil on the desk.

“Coming,” I called, even though there was no one there to hear me. Arden wasn't home yet. He'd texted around six to say his call with the Singapore office was running long, so I'd given up on dinner and eaten cereal at the kitchen counter instead.

I padded downstairs in my socks, half expecting the courier from the fabric house. The silk I'd ordered two weeks ago was supposed to arrive Tuesday. It was Thursday.

I opened the door and there was nothing there except a plain brown box sitting on the mat, no courier in sight, no van pulling away down the driveway. That was strange. Usually they waited for a signature.

I picked it up. It was lighter than I expected, and there was no return address or company logo, just my name and the house address printed in plain block letters.

I should have left it alone, but curiosity has always been my weakness, so I carried it into the living room, set it on the coffee table, and pulled the tape off.

Inside were photographs, a whole stack of them.

The first showed Arden getting out of a car. Nothing about that was unusual, but the woman waiting for him made my stomach drop. Celeste, his ex girlfriend.

I recognized her from the one photograph I'd seen years ago, back when Arden had mentioned her name once and never brought her up again.

I turned to the next photograph, then another. At first, I tried to find an explanation. Maybe it was a business meeting. Maybe they had run into each other over lunch. I kept looking for something that would make the pictures harmless.

By the fourth photograph, I couldn't explain it away anymore.

Arden had his hand on the small of her back as they walked into a hotel. In the next one, they were sitting across from each other at a table, their knees almost touching, with her hand resting over his.

The last few photographs were taken inside a hotel room and I turned one face down to stare at the others, my hands shaking as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

The date took me aback, three weeks ago, when Arden had told me he was in Singapore for the merger.

My eyes went back to the photographs, and that was when I noticed his watch.

The platinum one with his initials engraved inside the band. I'd spent four months of my commissions saving for it before our second anniversary. I'd wrapped it myself in blue paper because he liked blue, and when he'd opened it, he'd kissed my forehead and promised he would never take it off.

He hadn't, he had simply worn it to see someone else.

I don't know how long I sat there with the photographs spread across the coffee table. I kept waiting for my mind to find an explanation because that was what I had been doing for the past weeks. When Arden came home late, I blamed work. When he went quiet for days, I told myself he needed space.

I'd gotten so used to finding reasons for his behavior that even now, with the evidence sitting in front of me, I spent several minutes trying to find one.

I heard his car in the driveway a little after eleven. The garage door groaned open, and I listened to his footsteps come up through the mudroom. I sat there with the photographs fanned out across the coffee table and waited for him to find me.

He stopped in the doorway of the living room, tie already loosened, jacket over one arm. "You're still up."

"I was waiting for you."

My voice must have told him this wasn't a normal night, because his eyes went to the coffee table before I'd even said another word. I watched his face while he looked at the photographs. I wanted to see the confusion that would tell me this was a mistake, a setup, someone else's face superimposed onto his. I waited for literally any expression that would tell me it was all false.

What I got was indifference. His jaw tightened and his eyes moved from one photograph to the next with a kind of methodical calm that made my skin crawl, like he was reading a report rather than looking at pictures of himself.

"Arden." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "Tell me this isn't what it looks like."

He didn't answer right away. He set his jacket down over the back of the armchair like he needed the extra few seconds before he had to say anything at all.

"Arden." I stood up. "Please. Just tell me."

"You already know what it is," he said. "What else do you want me to tell you?”

My brain did a literal short circuit. I actually put a hand out to the arm of the couch to steady myself, because my legs had stopped feeling entirely reliable. “You’re not even going to try to deny it?”

"I slept with Celeste."

The way he said it made me feel hopeless. I opened my mouth to ask why, and found that the answer, no matter what it was, could never fix anything.

"Why?" I said. "Why would you do that to us? To our marriage?"

I expected him to look ashamed. I expected, at the very least, some flicker of the man who had cried at our wedding when he thought no one was looking, who had held my hand through my father's funeral without letting go once. Instead his expression hardened, when he spoke, his voice was cold and detached.

"I only continued what you started."

For a second I genuinely thought I had misheard him. "What I… what are you talking about?"

"Don't." He said it quietly, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted it. "Don't stand there and make me spell it out."

"Spell what out? Arden, I have no idea what you're accusing me of." My voice cracked on the last word. "I have never… I have never touched another man since the day I married you, I don't understand what you think I've done."

"Stop. I'm not doing this. I'm not standing here while you lie to my face."

"I'm not lying!" The words tore out of me louder than I meant them to. "Tell me what you think I did. Tell me, and I will explain it to you, because whatever you think happened, it isn't true—"

"You know exactly what you did, Faouzia. I'm not going to let you turn yourself into the victim after everything."

"After everything?" I could hear how thin my voice had gotten, "Arden, I don't know what everything is. You have to tell me. You have to actually tell me what you think I did, because I am standing here and I have done nothing, and you are looking at me like I'm a stranger—"

"I'm done talking about this tonight." He picked his jacket back up off the armchair.

"You can't just…" I reached for his arm and he stepped back, out of my reach, and something about that small motion, the way he physically pulled away from me like I might contaminate him, made my eyes widen. I pressed a hand over my mouth and swallowed hard against the nausea climbing up my throat, and when I looked up he was already walking toward the stairs, his back to me.

"Arden." I couldn't make my voice go any louder than a whisper now. "Please don't walk away from me."

He didn't stop until I heard the bedroom door close upstairs.

I sat back down on the couch, surrounded by the photographs. For a while I just sat there in the dark, listening to the quietness, waiting to wake up from whatever this was. I went to the mantel, to the framed photograph from our wedding — Arden in his grey suit, laughing at something just out of frame, me in my mother's veil with my head tipped back against his shoulder. I picked it up and sat down on the floor with my back against the couch, holding it against my chest, and that was when the crying finally came

It was officially a week after that night and if someone told me things would get this bad, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Arden moved out of our room the morning after that confrontation and that was the least of the awful things he’s done within the week that followed. On the second day, I mustered up enough courage to ask him and his response was simply that he wasn’t planning to share a bed with an unfaithful woman any longer, and then he shut the door. That sentence hurt me more than I would ever admit and I cried myself to sleep, wondering if I was losing my mind, or I’d done what he was accusing me of and completely lost my memory of it.

I went back downstairs and stood in the kitchen for a long time, my hand flat against the cold marble counter because I didn't trust my legs to carry me anywhere.

By the second week, Arden had stopped pretending he cared whether I noticed his escapades or not.

One Thursday night, close to midnight, I heard his car pull into the driveway. A few minutes later, I heard two sets of footsteps and a woman's laughter coming from the floor below. I sat in bed staring at the wall and told myself I had misheard.

I hadn't actually and I knew that for a fact, but it was more comforting to pretend it was all in my head.

The laughter came again, followed by footsteps heading toward the guest wing. I pulled the pillow over my head and stayed there until the house went quiet. I refused to go downstairs and see who she was.

Three days later, I didn't have a choice but to be met face to face with the evidence that my marriage was in literal shambles.

I passed a woman in the hallway on her way out. She was carrying her heels in one hand, her hair slightly messy, and when she saw me, she gave me a look that made my face burn.

I said nothing to her and decided to confront Arden himself.

"Do you have to bring them here?" I asked. He was in the study, going through papers, and he didn't even look up. "This is still my house too, Arden. Whatever you think of me. You could at least—"

"At least what? Spare your feelings?" Now he looked up, and there was something almost amused in his expression. "I wasn't aware you still had those where I was concerned."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" He set his pen down. "You want me to be considerate of your feelings in a marriage you already ended the moment you decided to sleep with someone else. I don't think you get to make that request, Faouzia."

"I never…" I stopped myself, because I had said it so many times by then, I never slept with anyone, I have no idea what you're accusing me of, and it had never made any difference, and I was so tired.

The tiredness was becoming more noticeable but I put it down to the stress at first. I told myself the nausea in the mornings, the way certain smells — coffee, of all things, coffee I used to love — made my stomach turn, the exhaustion that had me falling asleep at my sketch desk, all of it was just what happens to a person whose marriage is collapsing around her one humiliating day at a time.

It was until my sister-in-law's old assistant looked at me a certain way the day I ran into her at the pharmacy where I came to get something for the headache and said, "How far along are you?" I found myself laughing because the question sounded absurd.

"I'm not pregnant." was my response.

She shrugged and went back to her shopping. But the question followed me home, and that night I did the math in my head, counted backward, and realized with a cold drop in my stomach that I couldn't remember the last time I'd needed to buy anything for my period.

I bought the test the next day, at a different pharmacy, in a different part of the city, wearing sunglasses indoors like some kind of criminal, because the last thing I needed was for anyone to see Arden Whitmore's wife buying a pregnancy test and putting two and two together before I'd even had the chance to do the math myself.

I took it in the bathroom on the ground floor, the one we never used, and I sat on the edge of the tub with my elbows on my knees, watching the two minutes count down on my phone like it was the longest two minutes of my life.

It was positive.

I stared at the little pink line for so long that the timer on my phone went off and I actually jumped, because I'd genuinely forgotten I was waiting for anything. My hand went to my stomach, it was still flat, but the test had confirmed it. I was pregnant with Arden’s and my baby.

I almost let myself be happy about the news. It would have felt great to tell Arden about it, would have been great to imagine our future with our child.

Then I remembered the photographs. I remembered his voice telling me he wasn't going to let me play the victim. I remembered the woman's laugh drifting up to our bedroom.

The happiness went out of me like someone had opened a window in the middle of winter.

If Arden knew, he wouldn't see a baby. He would see proof. Confirmation of whatever story he'd already decided was true, and I understood, sitting there on the edge of that bathtub with a positive test in my shaking hand, that I had two options. I could tell him, and watch him look at my stomach the way he'd looked at those photographs, already deciding whose child this was and building a case against me before I'd even finished the sentence. Or I could say nothing at all.

I wrapped the test in tissue and buried it at the bottom of the bathroom trash, under the used cotton pads and empty packaging, and I went and sat in our room with my hand pressed to my stomach and made a decision that felt, in that moment, like the only solid thing left in my life.

He would not know, not yet at least. Maybe not ever, if it came to that.

I couldn;t let my child be born into a home where her father was unfaithful, I would not allow that.

Three days later, I filed for divorce. I had the papers drawn up quietly, through a lawyer two cities over who had never heard of Arden Whitmore and didn't care that he had, and I brought them home in a plain folder then set them on his desk in the study while he was reading through some quarterly report.

He looked at the folder, then at me.

"What is this?"

"You can read, Arden."

He opened it. I watched his eyes move down the first page, and I watched his jaw tighten the way it did when he was working very hard to control his reaction.

"You're serious."

"I've never been more serious about anything."

He closed the folder and set it down like it had offended him just by existing on his desk. "This is what you do. After everything. You get to sit there and act wounded, and the second things get uncomfortable for you, you run."

"I'm not running from anything. I'm leaving a marriage where my husband won't even tell me what I'm accused of."

"You know what you're accused of."

"I don't!" The word tore out of me louder than I meant it to, my voice cracking. "I have asked you a hundred times, Arden, a hundred times, tell me what I did, and you have never once told me, because there is nothing to tell, because I didn't do anything—"

"Stop." He said it quietly. "I'm not doing this again."

"Then don't act shocked when I sign these." My hands were shaking, but my voice, somehow, wasn't. "You didn't want a wife. You wanted someone to punish. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life being punished for something I never did."

"You think this is petty of me? You think I'm the one being unreasonable?" He laughed, short and humorless. "You cheat, and I'm the villain for reacting. That's rich, even for you."

"I never cheated on you." I said it slowly this time, carefully, like maybe if I said it slow enough it would finally get through to him. "I have never touched another man since the day I married you. I don't know what you saw, or what you were told, or who convinced you otherwise, but it is not true, and I am so tired, Arden. I am so tired of saying it and watching you decide not to believe me."

"Sign the papers if that's what you want," he said. "You'll be back in a month."

I picked up the pen from his desk, and I signed my name on the line, and I didn't let my hand shake while I did it, even though everything in me was shaking. Arden watched me do it with an expression I couldn't quite read, more like disbelief, like he genuinely hadn't thought I would go through with it, like some part of him had been so certain of me even while accusing me of the worst thing he could imagine.

"You're not going anywhere," he said, when I set the pen down. "You'll calm down in a few days."

I didn't answer him. I walked out of the study and didn't look back.

I packed that night, after he'd gone out.. I moved through the house I had decorated with my own hands, room by room, and took only what was important. My passport. The folder of documents. The small amount of money I'd quietly set aside over the years without ever telling him. My sketchbooks, some designs I'd abandoned when marriage and Arden's schedule and Arden's dinners and Arden's world had slowly eaten up all the hours I used to spend at my desk.

I cried while I packed. I stood in the doorway of our bedroom for a long moment before I left it for the last time, looking at the bed we used to share, the reading lamp on his side that he never turned off before falling asleep mid-sentence, the closet where half my clothes still hung, and I thought about how completely I had let this house become the only shape my life had. I had no mother to call. No father since he'd passed. No siblings who'd have room for a grown woman and her sketchbooks. I had built an entire existence around one man, and now I was leaving with two suitcases, and there was no one on the other end of any phone call I could make who would understand.

Before I left, I stopped in the hallway and put my hand over my stomach, still flat, still giving nothing away.

"I don't know what's going to happen," I whispered to the baby who couldn't hear me yet. "But you are never going to grow up thinking this is what love looks like. You're never going to watch your mother beg to be believed. I promise you that."

I booked the first flight I could get a seat on, three hours later, to a city I had never been to and knew no one in, because that felt safer somehow than going somewhere familiar, somewhere Arden might think to look. I cried through most of the flight, my forehead against the cold window, watching the lights of the city that had been my whole life shrink and disappear beneath the clouds.

I spent the first night in a cheap hotel near the airport, too exhausted to think past finding a bed. The next morning, red-eyed and running on almost no sleep, I found a small apartment two neighborhoods over from the hotel, paid the first month in cash, and stood in the middle of the empty living room listening to my own footsteps echo off bare walls.

That evening, I sat on the floor because I didn't have furniture yet, opened my sketchbook to a blank page, and picked up my pencil.

I had lost my marriage. I had lost the house, the name, the life I'd spent years building around someone else's needs.

But I still had this. My hand still knew how to move across a page.

If I had to rebuild everything else from nothing, I would start with the one part of myself I had never really lost. I had only put it aside while I was busy trying so hard to be loved

Arden’s POV

I gave her two days on purpose. Two days to sit somewhere and think about what she'd done, calm down, come back with an apology I had already decided I wasn't going to accept easily, because she wasn’t allowed to sleep with my own brother and walk away from that with nothing more than a folder of divorce papers and a dramatic exit.

I was still telling myself that when I pulled into the driveway, rehearsing the conversation I expected to have, the one where she tried to explain herself and I told her it was too late for explanations. I let myself into the house already braced for her voice, already braced for the argument.

But I didn’t get any.

"Faouzia." I called into the empty space.

Nobody answered me, and for a moment I stood in the entryway telling myself she was most definitely upstairs, ignoring me on purpose, making a point the way she liked to make points, by going quiet and letting the silence do the work she didn't want to do with words. I went up to check.

Her side of the closet was empty, and not in a way that looked like she packed in a hurry. The hangers were still lined up along the rod, spaced the way they'd always been spaced, which meant she'd taken the time to fold things properly. Her passport was gone from the drawer we both used. The ring I'd had made for her, my mother's stone reset into something new, wasn't in her jewelry box.

I went down to her studio next, and it was in the same state — the corkboard stripped bare, the shelf where she kept her sketchbooks left with nothing but the dust outlines of where they used to sit.

She hadn't stormed out to cool off somewhere. She'd planned this carefully and that realization made me feel something I would rather not name.

I told myself it didn't matter. She was emotional, she'd always been emotional, and this was simply the most dramatic thing she could do to make me chase her. She'd slept with my own brother and now she wanted me to feel guilty for reacting to it. I had proof of it, my brother— Cassian, had admitted to it and even apologised. And yet, she simply refused to be honest.

I called her anyway, mostly to confirm she'd landed somewhere and hadn't done anything stupid, and the call went straight to voicemail without a single ring.

By the second day of nothing, the irritation had started to curdle in my stomach. I called again between meetings and got the same automated greeting, and I sat there in my office afterward staring at a shipping contract I'd already read twice without absorbing a word of it, thinking about the fact that she'd left with no destination I knew of, no family to go to, nobody who'd take her in and keep her hidden from me if I decided to look.

I told myself I only cared because I needed to know where my wife was. That was all. A man was entitled to know where his wife had gone, regardless of what she'd done to deserve his contempt.

I came home on the fourth night meaning to change my shirt and go straight back to the office. I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face, and that was when I saw something near the edge of the sink, half hidden behind the soap dispenser. A thin white plastic stick.

I picked it up without understanding what I was holding at first. Then I saw the two lines, and I stood there staring at them like they would transform into something meaningful.

Then I thought about the last few weeks.

Faouzia had been tired all the time. She had barely touched her coffee some mornings, and there were days when certain smells seemed to bother her. I'd noticed it, but I had never thought much about it. I had been too busy being angry with her.

My eyes went back to the test that confirmed that she was pregnant.

If the baby was mine, then she had been pregnant while I was punishing her for something she might not have done.

I immediately pushed the thought away.

The photographs were real. I had seen them with my own eyes.

But for the first time, I couldn't make the rest of it fit as easily as it had before.

If she was pregnant now, and she'd left four days ago, then the arithmetic wasn't complicated. It was mine, or it was my brother's, and I made myself consider the second possibility carefully, because it was the one that let me keep standing on solid ground. She could have been pregnant before any of this happened. The timing didn't prove anything. A positive test told me nothing about who the father was, and I was not the kind of man who reached conclusions without evidence.

But I kept coming back to the way she'd looked at me that night, and the question I hadn't let myself ask properly until now. What if she really hadn't known what I was accusing her of.

I didn't like where that question led, so I did what I always did with things I didn't like. I set it aside and told myself the photographs had been real, that I hadn't imagined any of it, that whatever confusion she'd shown me that night could have been guilt dressed up as innocence and she was better at this than I'd given her credit for. My brother wouldn't have lied to me about something like that. I'd built an entire month of decisions on the certainty that he hadn't.

None of it felt as solid as it had an hour ago.

I called her again. It went to voicemail, the same as every other time, and I stood there with the phone against my ear a few seconds longer than I needed to, listening to her recorded voice tell me to leave a message, before I finally lowered it.

I needed to find her. That was all I was going to focus on. I needed to know where she had gone, who she was with, and whether there was anything about this pregnancy that I had missed.

The photographs were still real. Faouzia had still betrayed me with my brother, and I wasn't going to let one pregnancy test make me forget that.

But as I stared at the test on the counter, I couldn't stop thinking about one question.

What if the baby was mine?