I got out, and I took the papers with me.

Paige Matthews was waiting downstairs.

The second I stepped off the elevator she took my suitcase from me and steered me toward her car.

She didn't say anything until my seatbelt was on and we'd pulled out of the complex.

"Did you and Donald have a fight?"

I leaned against the window. The scenery kept sliding backward, and it made me a little dizzy.

I shook my head weakly. "No."

"Then you..."

"I want a divorce!"

"What?"

Paige slammed on the brake.

The car behind almost rear-ended us, then swerved around, the driver cursing out the window.

Paige rolled her window down, apologized over and over, then pulled her head back in.

"What happened? Did Donald cheat on you?"

I looked at the worry on her face and stayed quiet.

I didn't know what to say.

Donald and I had always gotten along well.

He was willing to smooth things over with me, willing to spend money on me.

Paige had teased me more than once, calling Donald a boyfriend who treated me like a doted-on daughter.

He was patient enough, and he spoiled me enough.

And yet a man like that could, one day, complain to an outsider that his own wife was a lunatic, that he regretted marrying her.

Maybe my face was too miserable, because Paige suddenly didn't want to hear it.

She turned back to the wheel and waved a hand at me.

"Okay, okay, if you don't want to talk about it, we won't."

"Rest for a bit. I'll get you home."

The car started moving again.

I leaned back against the window, but my eyes couldn't settle on anything.

That night, after a shower, she and I lay under the covers.

With the lights off it was pitch dark, and no matter what I did I couldn't fall asleep.

I said Paige's name.

She rolled toward me, and her answer came soft in the dark.

I waited a long time, long enough that her breathing had gone light and even.

Only then did I speak again.

"Paige, he said... he never really wanted that child anyway."

Paige shot up in bed.

"He said that to your face?"

"No. He said it to someone else."

"To who?"

I lowered my eyes. Something in my chest felt like it had been filled with dead, stagnant water.

"I don't know."

"That dog of a man. I'm going to call him and rip him apart."

She turned to feel for her phone on the nightstand, and I caught her arm.

I said, "Don't. There's no point."

Paige sighed and lay back down, still fuming on my behalf.

"You went through all that suffering to give him a child, and he can say something like that?"

"If he didn't want it, why didn't he say so back then?"

"Putting you through all that for nothing..."

If there was anything about these five years married to Donald that hadn't gone smoothly, it was the matter of having a child.

We'd gone to every hospital, big and small, and never once found out why I couldn't get pregnant.

The days went by, one after another, until Donald's mother couldn't sit still any longer.

She called the two of us back to the old house and suggested we try IVF.

Donald didn't refuse.

After that, we started going in and out of hospitals constantly.

The first time I came out of the operating room, my whole body felt hollow, my face drained white.

Donald was terrified. He said we should stop.

Seeing how much it hurt him, how could I keep letting him carry that weight?

So from then on, whenever I went to the hospital, I had Paige come with me instead.

Paige cried every time.

She knew better than anyone how much I feared the operating table.

Because my mother died on an operating table.

I was only five then.

Over and over, I forced myself past that enormous, bone-deep fear.

And in the end, he said... he never really wanted that child anyway.

I said, "Paige, I need you to look into something for me."

Three months ago, my IVF had just succeeded.

Not long after, my inbox started filling with anonymous emails.

I opened them. All of them held the same kind of ugly little photos.

Donald's face in profile, asleep. Donald's personal teacup with a lipstick print on the rim. A hand wearing Donald's wedding ring.

I never gave them a second thought.

Because I knew Donald wouldn't cheat.

These photos looked more like a taunt from someone who wanted him and couldn't have him.

I put all my energy into the baby.

Anything that might upset me, I stopped so much as opening.

Until one rainy night, twenty-eight days ago.

Donald said the company had a thirty-million-dollar project to rush, and everyone was working overtime.

He'd suggested keeping the housekeeper at home to look after me. I told him no.

Neither of us liked a crowd.

Instead of a big house full of staff, we preferred squeezing into a small space, just the two of us.

So after we married, the housekeeper and driver we hired both lived elsewhere.

I never once imagined that one small decision would cost me my child that night.

That evening I'd curled up on the couch, listening to music.

It was part of the prenatal routine.

Halfway through, the music cut off.

I reached for my phone to see what was wrong.

That was when I realized the phone seemed to have caught a virus.

The whole screen was taken over by one particular photo of a couple in bed. I couldn't close it, couldn't back out of it.

On the wine-red sheets, two hands of very different sizes were locked together, gripping hard.

The one on top had veins standing faintly along the back of it, everything about it charged.

A man's wedding ring had been slipped off the hand.

One end of it teased up by a woman's long, slender fingers, the other end tucked into a fold of the sheet.

In the dim, flickering light, I saw a small black mark on the man's elbow, and my composure gave out all at once.

I jabbed at the phone, trying to force that image out of it.

I wanted to call Donald, to hear him tell me it was fake.

But no matter how fast or how hard I tapped, that photo stayed exactly where it was.

I was so upset I smashed the phone, then went downstairs barefoot to ask the front desk for help.

Just as I stepped out of the elevator, something slammed hard into my right shoulder from behind.

I stumbled forward a few steps, and my belly hit the sharp corner of the fire cabinet.

And just like that, the baby was gone.

It's not that I never thought about telling Donald.

But I'd smashed the phone. The evidence was gone.

These past two months, I've felt hollow, panicked.

I turned sensitive, fragile.

So I kept calling Donald, over and over, asking whether he blamed me.

Donald said he didn't, but he came home later and later, until even a few extra words seemed to wear him out.

So I made myself forget about it.

But now, I want the truth.

I want to know who schemed this carefully, who stopped at nothing, to frame me.

Paige has a childhood friend named Finn Smith, a bit of a computer genius.

At eighteen he'd gone head to head with national security.

Handing this to him to trace was nothing at all.

Except, when the results came back, I could hardly believe my own eyes.

The real IP addresses behind those emails all pointed to one place——

the private office on the very top floor of Henson Group.

"There's no mistake?" Paige asked Finn.

"Relax, no mistake." Finn tapped the stack of data. "When I climbed the wall, I saw that this IP had extremely high access. Best security system too."

"In a whole company, top-level access on a computer, top-level security, that can only be the CEO."

"No way. Then why would he send Lottie these pictures? To force her to file for divorce herself?"

"What are you thinking?" Finn flicked Paige on the forehead, his face full of disdain. "Who says that just because it's his computer, he's the one who sent them?"

His eyes slid over to me, full of mockery.

"Maybe he's got a mistress stashed away somewhere."

I didn't answer. I just packed the data files back into the envelope, one by one.

"Him or someone else, I'll know once I go look."

Those two months after I lost the baby, I was always guessing, always turning it over.

Now, I'm done guessing.

I'm going to do it the direct way, and drag that person out——into the open.