The Wife He Let Go

Chapter Nine: The Threat

Bianca didn't move from the doorway. She stood there with her arms crossed, her eyes flicking between us like she was still waiting for one of us to explain the math away.

"I'm going to ask this once," she said, her voice dropping into something colder than I'd ever heard from her before, "and I want an actual answer. Whose baby is that?"

Marcus stepped between us before I could answer, which I hadn't decided whether to appreciate or resent.

"This isn't the place, Bianca."

"No." She laughed, short and humorless, and stepped fully into the room, letting the door swing shut behind her. "I think this is exactly the place. You cleared an entire conference room. You've had your hand on her stomach for the last two minutes like it belongs there. I think we're well past the place where I don't get to ask."

"It's mine," Marcus said.

He said it fast, flat, no hesitation, and something in my chest tightened at how easily the words came out of him, like he'd already decided this answer somewhere in the last ten minutes and simply been waiting for someone to ask him out loud.

Bianca went very still.

"Three months, Marcus." Her voice had gone quiet in a way that felt more dangerous than the sharpness before it. "Three months ago you were still married to her. Three months ago you told me the marriage was over in everything but paperwork, that there was nothing left worth saving."

"There wasn't," Marcus said.

"Except apparently there was enough left for this." She gestured toward me without looking at me, like I'd become a fact in the room instead of a person standing in it.

"I'm still here," I said, sharper than I meant to, though I didn't regret it. "You can ask me things directly. I'm not a prop in your argument."

Bianca's eyes finally landed on me fully, and whatever careful restraint she'd been performing for the last minute dropped away entirely.

"Fine," she said. "Did you know? When you signed those papers, when you told him he'd regret it and walked out into the rain like it was some grand exit, did you already know you were pregnant?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't tell him."

"No."

"Why not?" She said it like an accusation, like the omission itself was the crime, worse somehow than anything Marcus had actually done.

"Because he'd already made his choice clear," I said, keeping my voice level even though my hands had curled into fists at my sides. "He handed me divorce papers the same night I planned to tell him. You walked in wearing his ring size in confidence before the ink was even dry. I wasn't going to hand a man like that a reason to stay out of obligation instead of choice."

"A man like that." Bianca's mouth twisted. "You make it sound so simple. Like I was some scheming mistress who broke up a happy marriage."

"Weren't you?"

"No." She said it fast, too fast, something cracking underneath her composure for the first time since she'd walked in. "I was a woman who was told, very clearly, that the marriage was already over. I didn't break anything, Sienna. I just walked into a house that was already empty."

The room went quiet for a moment. I hated how much sense that made, how easily it lined up with five years of missed dinners and distance I'd spent too long calling temporary.

"That doesn't change what happens now," Marcus said, his voice steady, final, the same tone he probably used to close deals worth more than most people's lifetimes. "I have a child. I'm not going to pretend I don't."

Bianca turned to face him fully, and whatever softness had crept into her voice a moment ago was gone completely.

"And what exactly does that mean for us?"

"I don't know yet." At least he was honest, I'd give him that. "But I'm not walking away from this baby the way—"

He stopped himself before he finished the sentence, but all three of us heard the shape of it anyway. The way I walked away from you. The way I almost let her raise my child without ever knowing.

Bianca's expression shifted, something calculating settling into it that made my stomach drop lower than the nausea had a few minutes ago.

"Your grandmother is going to have a great deal to say about this," she said quietly, almost pleasantly, which somehow made it worse. "So will mine, for that matter, given how carefully our families arranged this little transition. You think the board is going to sit quietly while their newly single CEO gets tangled up in a scandal with his pregnant ex-wife, three months after a very public, very expensive divorce?"

"That's not your concern," Marcus said.

"It's exactly my concern." Bianca's voice hardened again, all pretense of hurt gone, replaced by something sharper, more strategic. "I didn't spend the last two months rearranging my entire life around you to watch it collapse because you couldn't keep your hands off your ex-wife for one business meeting. If this gets out before you've decided how to handle it, and it will get out, Marcus, people like Farrah don't stay quiet about things like this, it's not just your reputation that takes the hit. It's the entire rebrand. It's every contract with my father's firm that's tied to this partnership."

I watched something shift in Marcus's face, the same calculating stillness I remembered from every business call he used to take at midnight, the version of him that measured cost before anything else.

"Are you threatening me?" he asked quietly.

"I'm warning you." Bianca smiled, thin and cold. "There's a difference. You have until the end of this week to decide how you want this story to be told, because I promise you, if you don't control it, I will."

She turned on her heel and walked out without another word, her heels clicking sharp and even against the floor until the door swung shut behind her, leaving the two of us standing in a silence that felt heavier than anything that had come before it.

"She wouldn't actually," I started.

"She would." Marcus dragged a hand down his face, and for the first time since I'd walked into that conference room, he looked less like the composed executive I'd been pitching to an hour ago and more like a man watching every carefully built piece of his life come apart at once. "Her father owns forty percent of this deal. If she wants this ugly, she can make it very, very ugly, for both of us."

My phone buzzed in my bag before I could answer him. I pulled it out without thinking, and felt the last of my composure c***k clean through when I saw the name on the screen.

Grandma. Three missed calls in the last four minutes, and a message underneath them that made my whole body go cold.

Sienna, call me back immediately. It's about the baby.