The Wife He Let Go

Chapter Eight: What He Already Knew

Everyone out."

Marcus's voice cut across the room before I'd even found my footing again, low and controlled in a way that fooled everyone but me. I knew that tone. I'd heard it exactly twice before in five years of marriage, both times right before he did something he couldn't take back.

Farrah hesitated. "Should I call someone? Water, or—"

"I'll handle it." He didn't look away from me while he said it. "Give us the room."

Chairs scraped back. Desmond gathered his laptop without a word, and Priya touched my shoulder on her way past, murmuring something about feeling better soon that I couldn't quite process. The door clicked shut behind the last of them, and then it was just the two of us, the conference table, and the silence he let stretch on purpose before he finally spoke.

"How far along are you?"

I straightened, buying myself a second I didn't have. "Marcus—"

"How far along, Sienna." His voice didn't rise, but something underneath it did, something that made the question land less like curiosity and more like an accusation he was still deciding how to aim. "Don't make me count backward from the last night I saw you in that house."

I could have lied. I ran the calculation in the half second I had, whether there was any version of this where I said the wrong number, invented a different timeline, gave him some other man's name to hide behind. But he already knew. I'd watched the math happen behind his eyes the second his hand landed against my stomach, and lying now would only turn this into something crueler than it already was.

"Almost three months," I said quietly.

Something moved through his face, fast, unguarded, gone before I could name it. "Three months." He said it like he was testing the words for weight. "That means the night I—"

"Yes." I cut him off before he could finish it, before either of us had to hear the whole sentence out loud. "That night."

He was quiet for a long moment, standing very still on the other side of the table, his hands braced against the back of a chair like he needed something solid to hold onto.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

The question landed exactly the way I'd known it eventually would, exactly the way I'd been bracing for since the night I signed those papers, and still it hit harder than I expected.

"Why would I?" My voice came out sharper than I planned, but I let it stay sharp. "You handed me divorce papers the same night I came home from the doctor. You had another woman standing in our house before the ink was even dry. What exactly was I supposed to say, Marcus? Congratulations, you're free, and also here's a baby to tie you to me for the next eighteen years?"

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" I stepped back from the table, putting distance between us because I needed it, because standing this close to him made it too easy to remember what his hand had felt like pressed against me a few minutes ago, steady and certain in a way I hadn't let myself miss until right now. "You made your choice. I watched you make it. I wasn't going to hand you a reason to pretend you'd made a different one."

"So you were just never going to tell me." His voice cracked slightly on the last word, the first real c***k I'd heard in it in longer than I could remember. "You were going to let me find out what, in eighteen years? At a graduation? A wedding?"

"I was going to raise my child," I said, "without asking anything from a man who already showed me exactly what he thought I was worth."

He flinched. I watched it happen and didn't look away, didn't soften it, even though some old, tired part of me wanted to.

"That's not what I thought," he said, quieter now. "That's not what you were worth to me."

"Then what was I?" The words came out before I could stop them, five years of unanswered versions of that exact question finally finding a place to land. "Because from where I was standing, Marcus, I was an obligation you were finally free of. I was the wife who defended you in public while you skipped dinners and let calls go to voicemail. I was convenient, until I wasn't."

"You were never just convenient." He came around the table, closing the distance I'd just put between us, and I made myself hold still instead of stepping back again. "I know I don't have the right to say that now. I know exactly what it sounds like, standing here, after everything. But it's true."

"It doesn't matter anymore." I said it as much for myself as for him. "I've already decided how this goes. I take care of myself. I take care of this baby. You don't have to be involved if you don't want to be, and you don't get to be involved just because you suddenly want to be, three months in, because your hand happened to land in the wrong place during a business meeting."

"And if I want to be involved?" He said it low, careful, like he was testing whether the floor would hold under the question. "What then?"

I didn't have an answer ready for that one. Three months of careful, deliberate planning, and somehow I'd never let myself imagine this exact moment, him asking instead of assuming, him standing close enough that I could see exactly how much this was costing him to say out loud.

The door opened before I had to find out what I would have said.

"Marcus?" Bianca's voice, bright and unbothered, cutting into the room like she owned every square foot of it. "Your assistant said you cleared the conference room in the middle of a client meeting, which honestly sounds like the start of a very good story—"

She stopped in the doorway.

Her eyes moved from Marcus to me, then down, slow and deliberate, to the hand he still had resting inches from my stomach where he'd caught himself before he'd finished reaching for me again.

"Oh," she said, and her voice had gone very, very quiet. "I see.”