LOVING ME AND MY QUADRUPLETS

Karma comes Knocking

Chapter 7 — Elizabeth's POV**

Funny how karma works, isn't it? People spend their whole lives believing they've gotten away with something, right up until the moment the universe decides to remind them otherwise. I've always believed that. I've watched it happen to other people from a safe distance, smug in the knowledge that it would never touch me.

I never expected to be the one waiting on the other end of it for six long years.

Anna. Sweet, tired, grieving Anna. If only people knew the truth of how she ended up wearing that ring in the first place. If only they knew that I was supposed to be the one standing at that altar — not her. That I was supposed to be the one raising his children, running his household, standing beside him at every gala and every ribbon-cutting and every milestone that made the papers.

I met Vince first. Long before Anna ever crossed his path, long before she wandered into his life with that soft-spoken shyness men like him seem to find so irresistible. We were introduced through a mutual friend at a charity gala, of all places, both of us dressed to the nines, both of us young and hungry for something bigger than the lives we'd been handed. I remember exactly what he wore that night — a navy suit, no tie, collar undone just enough to look effortless instead of careless. I remember the way he looked at me across the room like I was the only person there worth looking at, like the rest of the party had faded into the background the moment our eyes met.

We talked for hours that night, long after most of the other guests had gone home. About business. About the empire he wanted to build from nothing but stubbornness and a warehouse he could barely afford. I told him about my own ambitions — the modeling work I'd been doing, the boutique I dreamed of opening one day — and he listened. Really listened, in a way most men never bothered to. By the end of that night, I was certain I'd found something rare. Something worth building a life around.

For months, things unfolded exactly as they should have. He called every few days, sometimes just to hear my voice. He took me to dinner in places most people only ever see photographed in magazines. He introduced me to his brother, to his closest friends, to the small circle of people who mattered most to him, and I let myself believe — foolishly, in hindsight — that I was already part of his future. I started imagining the wedding, if I'm honest with myself now. The dress. The venue overlooking the water. The life I thought I was quietly building alongside him, one dinner and one introduction at a time.

And then Anna happened.

I still don't fully understand what he saw in her. She wasn't from money. She didn't come from the kind of world that prepares a woman to stand beside a man like Vince Whitmore, to host his business partners, to smile through the kind of scrutiny that comes with a life like his. She was ordinary in every way that mattered — quiet, a little awkward at parties, always more comfortable fading into the background than commanding a room. Everything I wasn't. Everything I'd worked so hard *not* to be.

But somehow, she got under his skin in a way I never managed to, no matter how hard I tried. I watched it happen in slow motion over the course of a few short months — watched him pull away from me a little more each week, watched the calls get shorter and less frequent, the dinners quieter, distracted, like his mind was already somewhere else. Until one evening he sat me down in his apartment, told me so gently it made me want to scream, that he'd met someone else. Someone he couldn't imagine building his future without.

I smiled at him that night. Told him I understood, that these things happen, that I wished him nothing but happiness.

I was lying through every single word of it.

I watched their courtship unfold after that from a careful, calculated distance — close enough to keep track of everything that mattered, far enough that no one ever suspected I still cared. I watched him propose to her at some overly sentimental dinner by the water, the whole scene practically staged for a magazine spread. I watched the engagement announcement make its rounds through the same social circles that used to whisper about *me* as his future wife, watched their names printed together in place of where mine should have been. I sat through their wedding smiling in the third row, clapping when everyone else clapped, toasting to their happiness with champagne that tasted like ash in my mouth the entire evening.

For six years, I carried that. Six years of watching her play the role that should have belonged to me — his wife, the mother of his children, the woman standing beside him at every event I used to picture myself attending on his arm.

And now look at her.

Husband dead. Bank officials showing up at her door, threatening to take the very roof over her head. Four babies she can barely manage on her own, dark circles carved permanently under her eyes, a life crumbling apart piece by piece right in front of her, in full view of everyone who once envied her.

I sat in my office that afternoon, legs crossed, a glass of wine within easy reach, turning it all over in my mind with something that felt dangerously close to satisfaction. I know it isn't kind. I know a better woman would feel nothing but sympathy for a widow raising quadruplets alone. But I stopped pretending to be that kind of woman a long time ago — somewhere around the moment Vince chose her over me, in front of everyone who mattered.

I thought I would have moved past this by now. I thought six years would have been enough time to bury the resentment somewhere it couldn't reach me anymore. But watching her fall apart, piece by piece, in a way I never had to — it does something to a person. It reminds you that the universe keeps better records than we give it credit for.

She has no idea how many people in her life right now used to belong to mine first. How many conversations happen just outside her awareness, in rooms she's never been invited into, about the very things that are unraveling around her.

She thinks it's simply bad luck. Grief compounding on grief. A widow's misfortune, nothing more sinister than that.

I lifted my glass and took a slow sip, watching the evening light stretch long shadows across my office floor, gold fading slowly into grey.

*Well, well, well,* I thought, allowing myself a small, private smile.

*This is just the beginning.*