MY HUSBAND'S PERFECT ALIBI

LEFTOVERS

Ivy heard him on the stairs before she saw him, phone already lit in his hand, thumb moving before his feet had fully cleared the last step.

He didn't look up until he was almost at the table, and by then she'd had a full ten seconds to watch him arrive somewhere without arriving at all, present in body and nowhere else.

She'd had Josie plate the branzino for breakfast exactly as it had been served the night before, garnish and all, because she wanted to watch his face when he saw it.

Josie set the last plate down and lingered a beat too long by the sideboard, glancing at Ivy as if to ask whether she should stay or go.

Ivy gave the smallest shake of her head, and Josie slipped out through the kitchen door without a word.

Sebastian stopped short at the sight of the table.

"What is this?"

"Branzino. Citrus reduction. It was supposed to be last night's dinner."

He looked at her blankly, and for a moment she watched him search for the memory and come up with nothing at all.

"Last night?"

"Our anniversary," Ivy said. "You told me to keep the champagne iced. You said we had something bigger to celebrate."

"Right. Of course." He sat down, unbothered, already reaching for his coffee instead of the plate.

"I'm sorry about that. The meeting ran long, and by the time I got home you were already asleep. I should have called."

"You did call."

"Did I?" He said it the way he said most things about her, half-remembered and entirely unbothered by the gap. "Well. I'm sorry regardless."

He glanced down at the fish again, prodding it with his fork like it had personally inconvenienced him.

"I don't really eat this for breakfast," he said. "Or at all, honestly. Too much acid this early. Where did you even learn to make something like this?"

"I've been cooking a long time," Ivy said, which was true in every sense he wasn't equipped to understand.

"Well, it's very ambitious." He pushed the plate an inch away and reached for the toast instead. "You've got a lot of free time to experiment now, don't you. I keep telling you, that's the whole point of not working anymore. Let yourself enjoy it."

Ivy watched him butter his toast, phone still glowing faceup beside his plate, and thought about how completely a person could sit across from you every morning without once wondering what you did with the hours in between.

"I got you something," he said, remembering suddenly, patting his jacket pocket before he found the small box and set it on the table between the coffee and the abandoned fish. "For the anniversary. I meant to give it to you last night."

She opened it. A bracelet, delicate and correct, chosen by someone paid to know her size and nothing else about her.

"It's lovely," Ivy said, and closed the box.

"I'm glad." He checked his watch, already halfway back to the version of himself that belonged to his office instead of his kitchen. "Was there champagne? You said you kept it iced."

"It's still in the fridge."

"We should have some tonight, then. Properly, this time." He smiled at her like the whole conversation had resolved itself neatly, like the missed dinner and the forgotten call and the eight years underneath both of those things had been folded up and put away.

Ivy watched him check his phone under the table again, the same gesture he'd once promised other men's wives he'd never make, and the decision she'd been putting off for weeks suddenly stopped feeling like a decision at all.

"I'm pregnant," she said.

Sebastian's thumb stopped moving over his phone.

He looked up slowly, and whatever expression crossed his face in that first half second, before he had time to arrange it into something more careful, was not the one she'd been afraid of.

It was worse. It was fear, plain and unguarded, gone as quickly as it had come.

"You're sure," he said.

"I took three tests."

He set the phone down. He didn't reach for her hand.

"Ivy." He said her name carefully, the way he addressed board members before delivering bad news. "We can't do this right now."

"We're not doing anything. It's already done."

"I mean the timing." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for the first time all morning he looked genuinely rattled, genuinely present in a way he hadn't managed once since walking in.

"The company's in the middle of the Whitmore acquisition. I can't be distracted with this right now, not this year."

"This isn't a business deal you can reschedule."

"I know that." His voice sharpened, impatience creeping into the careful tone. "I'm not saying it isn't real. I'm saying the timing is a disaster, and I think, given everything, we should talk about our options."

Ivy sat very still.

"Say what you actually mean."

He looked at her for a long moment, and she watched him decide to say it plainly, the way he decided most difficult things, quickly and without ceremony, the way you'd cut a losing position out of a portfolio.

"I think you should end it," Sebastian said. "I'm not ready to be a father. Not now. Maybe not for a long time. I think it's the responsible thing to do, for both of us."

"For both of us," Ivy repeated. "Or for the acquisition."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?"

She kept her voice even, the way she'd learned to keep it even in a kitchen mid-service, no matter what was on fire behind her.

"You've never once said the words not ready without a deadline attached to them. Not for children, not for a vacation, not for a single conversation that wasn't about your schedule."

"That's how life works when you're building something, Ivy. I'd think you'd understand that better than most people."

"I understand it perfectly," she said. "I've been living inside your version of it for eight years."

He opened his mouth to answer and seemed to think better of it, reaching for his coffee instead, and the silence that followed said more than either of them had managed in the last five minutes combined.

The bracelet sat open on the table between them, catching the morning light, entirely beside the point.

Ivy looked at her husband, this man who didn't know what she did with her days, who didn't remember his own phone call from the night before, who was asking her right now to erase the one thing in this marriage that hadn't been shaped entirely around his comfort, and understood with a strange, cold clarity that she already knew what her answer was going to be.

She just wasn't ready to say it out loud yet.