Too Late To Learn How To Love You

Chapter Two

Sophia's POV

"After three years of trying," the doctor said, still smiling, clearly expecting the news to land the way good news usually did in this room. "I imagine your husband will be thrilled."

Sophia said nothing. The doctor's smile faltered, his eyes catching, for the first time, on the sleeve she'd pulled too far over her wrist.

"Mrs. Cole." His tone changed. "Can I ask what happened to your arm?"

She let the sleeve ride up rather than answer directly.

"We're divorced," she said. "As of last night."

The doctor set down his pen. "Last night," he repeated. "And this morning you're here for pregnancy results."

"Yes," Sophia said. "I'm aware of how that sounds."

The doctor was quiet for a moment. "I'd advise against making any decisions you can't undo while you're still this raw," he said carefully. "Whatever you decide, give yourself some time first."

She thanked him and left without telling him what decisions she was already turning over.

The taxi to the airport took forty minutes. She spent all forty of them looking out the window, watching a city she'd once thought she'd grow old in slide past for what she suspected was the last time.

Her lawyer called before she'd even reached the departure gate.

"He's offering a settlement," the lawyer said. "Not ungenerous, given everything. Do you want to hear the terms?"

Sophia watched a departures board flip over to a new set of gate numbers before she answered.

"No," Sophia said. "I don't want anything from him. Not the house, not the money, nothing with his name anywhere near it."

"Sophia, you're entitled to—"

"I know what I'm entitled to," she said. "I don't want it." She hung up and put the phone face down on her lap, watching her own reflection in the darkened screen for a moment before she looked away.

She almost didn't make the next call. Her family had warned her for years, in every tone from gentle to furious, against marrying a man they'd never fully trusted and moving to a country none of them knew. She had married him anyway. She had left anyway. Some stubborn, exhausted part of her still expected, even now, to be told she'd earned whatever had happened to her.

"Come home," her mother said, before Sophia had managed anything else at all. No lecture. No reminder of every warning she'd once given and been ignored. "We'll be here. Just come home."

In the background, she could hear her father's voice asking who it was, and her mother's muffled answer, and something in the ordinariness of that exchange nearly undid her composure completely.

Sophia held the phone against her ear a moment longer than she needed to.

Across the gate, a young couple sat close together, the woman's stomach rounded under a loose dress.

"Absolutely not," the man was saying, laughing. "We are not naming her after your uncle."

"He'll be offended."

The woman caught Sophia watching and offered her a small, easy smile, the kind strangers give each other over shared amusement. Sophia made herself smile back.

Sophia's hand found her own stomach before she'd decided to let it. Her chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the baby. She looked away before it could turn into anything else, and reached for her phone instead. Anything to distract herself; that was how she found the post.

Official page. Cole Imports. Posted less than an hour ago. A photograph of a woman with her hand over a visibly rounded stomach, and a caption written in the warm, careful language companies use for things they want the public to celebrate: Ethan Cole was expecting his first child with his wife.

Sophia knew the woman. She'd met her four times over the years, always introduced the same way. Simply business. Nothing more. Her hands had gone cold around the phone.

Was he married to her this entire time? While I was still his wife. The thought landed somewhere behind her ribs and stayed there.

The post was already beyond containment, shared faster than the company page could keep pace with, strangers in the comments doing arithmetic with her own marriage's timeline in full public view. Someone had already found and tagged an old photo of Sophia and Ethan together at an industry dinner, captioned only with three question marks. By the time her flight was called, three separate accounts had used the word bigamy, and none of them, as far as she could tell, had gotten it wrong.

She pressed her palm flat against her stomach and let the questions come, one after another, faster than she could answer any of them.

Could she keep this child?

Her thumb found the search bar on her phone without her permission and hovered there, typing nothing.

Would she look at his face every day for the rest of her life and see the man who'd made him?

She locked the screen. Unlocked it. Locked it again. A flight attendant paused beside her row and asked if she wanted anything to drink. Sophia shook her head without really seeing the woman's face.

Would it be kinder, to a child who hadn't asked for any of this not to bring him into a story that already started this badly? She didn't have an answer for that one either.

And if she didn't. If she let him grow up anyway. What if, somewhere down the line, he grew up to become exactly the man his father was?

She turned the phone face down on her lap and didn't touch it again until the seatbelt sign switched off.

It buzzed once anyway, cutting cleanly through all of it. An email. A law office she didn't recognize, representing a man she used to be married to. Subject line: Finalized Decree of Divorce Attached.

She read the subject line twice, then a third time, then locked her phone, tears already forming in her eyes, and looked back out at the tarmac, waiting for the plane to finally start moving.

Less than twenty-four hours. Somewhere between discovering she was pregnant and watching a stranger argue happily over a baby name across a departure gate, Ethan Cole had made absolutely certain there was nothing left tying the two of them together at all, except the one thing he didn't yet know existed.