My Ex-husband's Golden Blood

The pregnancy test was still warm in my hand when Ethan Knight threw the divorce papers at my face. Two pink lines. One cruel man. "Sign it." His voice was ice. Three years of marriage, and he didn't even look at me. I stood in the middle of our bedroom in Knight Villa - the bedroom where I had waited for him every night for three years. The pregnancy stick was hidden behind my back, my palm sweating around it. I clutched it tighter. "Ethan, I—" "You are barren, Sarah." He loosened his tie, his eyes full of disgust. "The doctor confirmed it. My mother needs an heir, not a defective wife who can't even give me a child." Barren. The word on the divorce paper blurred through my tears. My hand trembled and instinctively went to my flat stomach where his child was growing. Four weeks and three days. I had found out exactly one hour and seventeen minutes ago at St. Mary's clinic. The female doctor had smiled and said, "Congratulations, Mrs. Knight." Now Mr. Knight was calling me barren. "Is it because of Chloe?" My voice broke. I hated how small I sounded. His jaw tightened at the mention of her name. Chloe Shaw. His first love. The ballerina who left him for Paris and now came back after three years. I had seen her i********: yesterday - her at his office charity gala, her hand on his arm. "Chloe can give me what you never could." He placed a black Montblanc pen on the marble table. The same pen he used to sign billion-dollar deals. "Don't make this ugly, Sarah. You get ten million dollars, the apartment in Brooklyn, and your freedom. I get mine." Ten million for three years. For the three years I cooked for him when he came home at 2 AM. For the nights I sat in the hospital when his father had a heart attack and he was in London. For the child he said was impossible. My tears fell on the thick paper, smudging the ink. If I told him now - that I was pregnant - would he stay? Would his cold eyes soften? Or would he call me a liar, a schemer trying to trap the CEO of Knight Enterprises? I remembered last week. His mother, Margaret Knight, screaming at me in the main hall of the Knight mansion while the maids watched. "You barren hen! Three years and your stomach is still flat! My son deserves a woman who can breed! If you can't, get out and let Chloe in! She already gave him—" She stopped herself then. Already gave him what? I never understood that sentence until now. No. If I told him I was pregnant, he would not believe me. He would say I faked the test. He would take my baby and give it to Chloe to raise as a Knight heir. Margaret would love that. I couldn't risk it. I picked up the heavy pen. My fingers were ice. "Ethan," I whispered, looking at the man I had loved since college. The man who once held me in the library and said I was his entire world. "If I sign... will you regret it? Even for one second?" He laughed. Cold and arrogant. The CEO who owned half of Manhattan laughed at his wife on the day she found out she was pregnant with his child. "The only thing I regret," he said, straightening his suit jacket, "is marrying you instead of her three years ago." Scratch. The sound of the pen tearing the paper was louder than my heartbeat. I signed. Sarah Miller Knight. The signature I practiced for weeks after our wedding. He grabbed the papers, checked my signature like I was a business contract, and walked to the door without looking back. No hug. No goodbye. "Be out of my house by tonight," he said to the door. "The driver will take your things to Brooklyn." The door slammed. The sound shook the chandelier. I slid to the floor, my back against our bed, holding my stomach, holding the two pink lines that he never saw. "You and me, baby," I whispered through broken tears, pressing the test against my belly. "Mommy will protect you. Even from your own father. Even if he never wants us." For ten minutes, I cried until I couldn't breathe. Then I wiped my tears, because my mother raised me to never beg a man who doesn't want me. I packed one suitcase. Not the Birkin bags he bought me. Not the diamond necklaces. Just my old clothes from before marriage, my nursing textbooks, and a small photo of us from college when he still smiled at me. Downstairs, Mrs. Lopez, the housekeeper who raised him, hugged me. "Mrs. Knight—" "Sarah," I corrected her, tears coming again. "Just Sarah now." "Where will you go, child?" "Somewhere he will never find us." Three hours later, I was at JFK airport. The ten million dollar check was still on the bedroom table. I didn't take it. I wanted my son to know his mother didn't sell him. I had $2,340 in my personal savings account and a nursing license I never used because Margaret said Knight wives don't work. At the airport clinic, because my stomach cramped from crying, the young nurse took my blood for a routine check. "What's wrong?" I asked when her face changed. She stared at the report, then at me, then called another doctor. Two doctors looked at my blood work whispering. "Mrs. Knight, do you know your blood type?" the older doctor asked. "I'm O positive, I think." He shook his head slowly, almost reverently. "No. You are Rh-null. Golden Blood. The rarest blood type on earth. Only 43 people in the entire world have it. Your blood has no Rh antigens at all." I didn't understand. "Is... is that bad for my baby?" "It is extremely rare. And extremely valuable. It means your child will also have very rare blood. He will need special care. And..." He hesitated. "If he ever needs a transfusion, only you or someone with the same null blood can give him blood. Not even his father can, unless—" "Unless what?" "Unless his father is also Rh-null, which is almost impossible. The odds are one in six million." I placed my hand on my stomach. My baby was not just a baby. He was a miracle with golden blood. And at that moment, alone in an airport clinic with divorce papers in my bag, I didn't know that three years later, that same golden blood would bring my cruel ex-husband to his knees in front of the whole hospital, begging me for the son he called barren. My phone buzzed. Ethan: _You left the check. Take it. Don't be dramatic._ I turned off my phone, bought a ticket to Boston, and never looked back. The cruelty of wanting him ended today. The cruelty of him wanting me back hadn't even begun.