"If you won't do the procedure, I'll switch to another hospital."

"And while I'm at it, I'll get a paternity test done too. In my nightmare last night, this kid didn't even call me Mom. He called me a bitch! Said I was nothing but a delivery service!"

I turned and headed for the door, pulling out my phone to book the procedure at Central Hospital.

"Bella! Wait! I'll write up the order!"

Molly's voice came shrill behind me.

Because she couldn't afford the gamble.

The moment a test proved the baby wasn't mine, everything between her and Jude would come crashing into the open.

Smiling, I turned around and settled back into the chair.

"Then I'll trouble you, Dr. Lambert!"

Face white, she wrote up the order, then pulled out the surgical consent form.

"A family member has to sign for the procedure. Have Jude come down here!"

"You call him. Don't you two have each other on speed dial? Saves me the phone charge!"

Something unnatural flickered across Molly's face, and she explained with the guilt of a thief caught in the act.

"Bella, Jude and I grew up together. We added each other to our family speed dial ten years ago. Don't read into it."

That same sugary, two-faced act.

Before, I'd thrown countless fits over how close she and Jude always were.

But every time, Jude brushed me off, saying the two of them were no different from brother and sister.

And since I was still counting on Molly for my IVF, all I could do was swallow the discomfort.

Molly dialed the call and handed me the phone.

"You tell Jude yourself. I can't be the one to say it!"

She didn't want to play the villain. She wanted Jude to despise me even more. I wasn't about to let her have her way.

I stayed silent, and Jude assumed it was Molly.

"Nana, we can't let her beat us to—"

The guilt jolted her. She cut him off, voice spiking.

"Jude, get to the hospital, now. Your wife is insisting on an abortion! Yes, she wants it done right away, and she wants a paternity test too..."

Jude got there fast, his forehead drenched in sweat.

He was supposed to be at work, and from the company to the hospital was thirty minutes even with no traffic.

And that was assuming no traffic.

But from Molly's first message to him walking through the door, only ten minutes had passed.

Which meant he hadn't rushed over from the office at all. He'd already been near the hospital.

I looked at his rumpled shirt, at the suspicious stains on his black slacks, and my stomach churned.

Seems he hadn't gotten his fill last night, afraid of waking me.

So he'd snuck off on his lunch break for seconds with Molly.

Forcing down the nausea, I pointed a trembling finger at his pants.

"Jude, weren't you at the office? How did you get here so fast? What have you been doing behind my back?"

Panic flashed in his eyes, and he scrambled for an excuse.

"Bella, I happened to be meeting a client nearby. When I heard you wanted an abortion, I knocked over my drink. That's all this is."

I didn't bother exposing his clumsy lie. I just handed him the surgical form.

"Oh. Then sign it."

Seeing that I really meant to go through with it, Jude's eyes went red with desperation.

"Bella! Everything was fine. Why an abortion all of a sudden? Are you feeling unwell somewhere?"

"Nana said you had a nightmare last night and now you want to abort the baby?"

I rubbed my temples, impatient.

"That's right. He called me a bitch, said I was just a delivery service, said I wasn't his mom. You think I can stomach that?"

"You know me. I've always believed in fate! I have to abort him, and then see whether he's even mine!"

Jude swallowed nervously and asked, uncertain.

"Besides dreaming about the baby, was there anything else?"

He was testing me.

I gave a faint tug at the corner of my mouth, deliberately knitting my brow as if to remember, then shook my head.

"There was more, I think, but it was gone by the time I woke up..."

Jude and Molly both let out a breath at the same time.

"Bella, it was only a dream. Dreams mean the opposite of what they show! How can you take it seriously?"

"This is the baby we've waited for so long. The proof of our love... Don't end it, all right?"

Jude's voice was actually shaking when he said it.

His eyes were full of pleading, of a man unwilling to let go.

If this baby were really mine, then even with him sneaking around with Molly, I wouldn't have it aborted.

Worst case, I'd take the child and leave the father behind.

"No. This pregnancy is ending. I don't want to carry it one more day."

The pleading froze on Jude's face, and something cold flickered in his eyes.

"Bella, it was just a nightmare. What exactly are you throwing a fit about?"

"I'm not throwing a fit. This baby kept me up all night. I don't want to have it anymore."

He suddenly gripped both my shoulders, hard enough to make me wince.

"Bella, can you stop being so willful? Do you have any idea how much money we spent and how much we both went through for this baby? You terminate now, and all of it is wasted. Do you know Mom prays every single day at home, just waiting to hold her grandchild?"

"If you get rid of this baby, you think Mom won't force us to divorce? By then you'll be crying too late to fix anything..."

Molly chimed in too.

"That's right, Bella. It was probably just your hormones giving you that nightmare. I'll write you a prescription for something to settle your nerves and you'll be fine. No need to end the pregnancy. Otherwise, if Mrs. Delgado finds out, she'll probably scold you all over again!"

At the mention of my mother-in-law, a flash of smugness crossed Molly's eyes.

Thanks to her, in three years of marriage to Jude, I had stayed childless.

And my mother-in-law had gone from liking me at the start to despising me.

Every holiday I went back, she'd order me around like a servant.

No matter how well I did, no matter how many gifts and red envelopes I gave her, she'd only sneer in roundabout jabs that I was a hen that couldn't lay eggs.

Last year she went further, saying it in front of every relative present:

"As a woman, if you can't even give your husband a child, then frankly, I'd have the decency to divorce him myself. Otherwise you're just a dog in the manger, cutting off another family's bloodline for nothing. Sooner or later that comes back on you!"

And all I could do was bow my head and work harder, so the relatives' pointing and whispering wouldn't get too loud.

The memory of those humiliations sent anger surging up in me, and my voice turned colder still.

"Even if we divorce, this pregnancy is ending!"

"I don't even care that everything I went through goes to waste. So what are the two of you in such a panic about?"

My eyes moved between the two of them, and then I gasped.

"Don't tell me the baby in my belly is yours? The two of you?"

"Bullshit!"

"Don't be ridiculous!"

Jude and Molly spoke as one.

But I knit my brows and pretended something had just come back to me.

"In the dream last night, I think I heard Dr. Lambert's voice too. What was it she said again?"

Molly and Jude's faces drained of color.

Terrified I'd remember more and finally realize it hadn't been a nightmare at all, Jude snatched up the pen and signed without hesitation.

"Molly, schedule her surgery as soon as you can."

"She wants a paternity test? Then she gets one!"

Humiliated and seething, he flung the surgical consent form in my face and said coldly,

"But if the results prove the baby is ours, then we divorce. And you walk away with nothing!"

Jude's shameless face was laid bare in that moment.

He was simply certain that with Molly in his corner, even a paternity test on this baby would only come back showing the child was mine.

What he didn't know was that I'd already had an amniocentesis done at Central Hospital.

The amniocentesis had been done personally by the president of the City OB-GYN Medical Association.

And the paternity results were already in.

This was exactly what I'd wanted—for them to commit an even bigger crime trying to bury their affair!

To destroy the evidence, Molly had pulled rank and scheduled my surgery immediately.

Lying on the operating table, Molly swabbed me with iodine, her eyes red, getting ready to put me under general anesthesia.

Jude watched the moving shadow on the ultrasound screen, and his eyes welled up too, as if he couldn't help it.

He took my hand and choked out:

"Bella, why don't we just call this off?"

"Look, the baby already has a human shape, and it's a boy. If you carry him to term, you'll be able to walk tall in my family for the rest of your life. No one will ever mock you again for not being able to have children…"

"And my mother would even write your name into the family register. You'd be qualified to take part in the memorials and everything…"

Molly turned her face away and dabbed at the corner of her eye.

"That's right, Bella, in another six months you'd have status as the mother of his son. Why throw all that away over a bad dream?"

"Even I can't bear to look at this tiny little life. How can you, his own mother, be so heartless?"

Status as the mother of his son?

The two of them had already worked out that the moment I gave birth, they'd kick me to the curb.

I had to hand it to them—the scumbag and the slut put on a flawless performance.

If I hadn't heard the truth with my own ears yesterday, I couldn't even imagine how wretched I'd be six months from now.

Just picturing that scene made me tremble all over with fury.

"This is my uterus. Whether I keep this baby or not, that's my call!"

"If you two keep running your mouths, see if I don't put a knife in him right here!"

I grabbed the scissors off the surgical cart and made a show of stabbing them toward my belly.

Sure enough, Jude and Molly went white with terror, eyes wide.

"No!"

The two of them lunged at me like they'd lost their minds.

The scissors were caught four inches from my stomach and wrenched away.

Anyone who didn't know better would think Jude was so afraid I'd hurt myself.

But the truth was, he was only afraid I'd hurt their son.

After all, the two of them had other plans.

Before I went into the operating room, I'd pretended to make a trip to the bathroom.

The hidden camera I'd secretly planted in Molly's office had captured, perfectly, yet another of Jude and Molly's scheming sessions.

"Jude, do you think Bella could have found out I snuck over to your place last night, that she heard what we were up to?"

Jude shook his head.

"No way! It had to be a nightmare!"

"Otherwise, with her temper, she'd have stormed in right then and made it a fight to the death with the two of us! You've seen it yourself—the way she goes crazy with jealousy over you!"

Molly let go of her worry completely, and said with deep regret:

"Such a shame about our son. All those months I spent cultivating him, finally getting it to work…"

Jude sighed.

"Nana, I'll try to talk her around in a bit, see if I can coax her out of the surgery. But if she still won't listen, can you strip the embryo out and transplant it into your uterus directly?"

Molly had no intention of carrying it herself, and she was afraid of the pain, so she broke into tears on the spot and said no.

But Jude wouldn't let it go. He took her hand and pleaded:

"Nana, this is our first child, after all. I really can't bear to let it go…"

"If we actually get rid of it, you'd have to start all over from scratch, and the two of us couldn't sleep together for at least three months…"

As Jude said this, tears actually slid down his face.

A single tear from a man, performed until your heart breaks.

Molly had no choice but to agree.

"Then I'll put her under general anesthesia in a bit, draw two vials of her blood for the test, and I guarantee she'll be thrown out like a stray dog with nowhere to go!"