He Married Me to Ruin My Family

I leave the hospital at four in the afternoon with a sonogram in my purse and a smile I cannot stop. Ten weeks pregnant. I am ten weeks pregnant. I have been trying to give my husband a child for fourteen months, and for fourteen months Adrian Whitmore has come home late, and kissed the top of my head, and gone to his study, and shut the door, and I have been crying in the bathroom every time my body told me no. Today, my body said yes. I had the test done at lunch. The midwife at my own hospital ran it for me as a favor, and she came back into the small consultation room twenty minutes later with tears in her own eyes, and she said, Doctor Beaumont, it is positive, and the heartbeat is strong, and you are ten weeks along. Ten weeks. I have been pregnant for ten weeks and I did not know. I cancelled my afternoon surgery. I told my chief I had a personal matter. I left the hospital in my own clothes for the first time in three days. I bought a small black velvet box on the way home, the kind men buy rings in, and I put the sonogram inside it. I am going to walk into our apartment, hand him the box, watch him open it, and watch the man I have loved for two years finally smile at me the way he used to smile, before whatever started going wrong between us four months ago started going wrong. I take the elevator to the twenty seventh floor. The doors open into our private foyer. I let myself into the apartment with my key. I am smiling. I am still smiling when I hear a woman laugh in my kitchen. I stop in the foyer. The laugh comes again. Low. Easy. The laugh of a woman who is comfortable. The laugh of a woman who has been in this kitchen before. The shower is running. I can hear it through the wall. My husband is in our shower. There is a woman laughing in our kitchen while my husband is in our shower. I do not move for one full second. Then I walk down the hallway. I am still holding the small black velvet box. I walk past the framed photograph from our wedding day. I walk past the small table where Adrian keeps the keys he never uses. I walk into my own kitchen. There is a woman standing at my kitchen island. She is wearing my husband's white bathrobe. The bathrobe is open at the throat. Her hair is wet. Her legs are bare. She is barefoot on my marble floor. She is holding a coffee cup in her hand. It is my cup. The white one with the small gold rim my grandmother sent me from Paris when I started medical school. The one Adrian gave me coffee in on the first morning we ever woke up together. The one that has been my cup for four years. The woman in the bathrobe is drinking from my cup. She turns her head when she hears me come in. She is gold haired. She is tall. She is beautiful in the way that women are beautiful when they have never once in their lives been told they are not. She is the kind of woman whose photograph appears in society pages in cities I have never been to. She looks at me. She smiles. It is a small slow smile. It is not the smile of a woman who has been caught. It is the smile of a woman who has been waiting for me to walk through the door. "Oh," she says. "You must be the wife." I cannot speak. She lifts my cup. She takes a slow sip from it. She sets it down on my kitchen island. There is a smear of red lipstick on the rim of my cup. "He said you would not be home until seven." My mouth is open. No sound is coming out. She tilts her head at me. "You are smaller than I thought you would be. From the photographs. He has photographs of you in his office, you know. Four of them. He never looks at any of them. I have asked." I drop the velvet box. It hits the marble floor of my kitchen and the small lid pops open and the sonogram slides halfway out, and I see the small grey shape of my own child, my child, ten weeks old, on the floor of my kitchen, inches from the bare foot of a woman in my husband's bathrobe. The woman looks down. She looks at the sonogram. Her face does something I do not see clearly because I am not breathing. Then she looks back up at me. "Oh, sweetheart," she says, and her voice is gentler now, the gentleness of a knife being slid between ribs. "Oh, no. Tell me you did not." The shower stops. I hear the small mechanical sound of the water cutting off in our bathroom. I hear the soft thump of Adrian stepping out of the shower onto the bath mat. I hear the rustle of him reaching for the towel I bought him in Paris last spring. I cannot move. My feet are on the marble. The sonogram is on the floor. The woman is in front of me. My husband is about to walk out of our bathroom. The woman crosses the kitchen. She bends down in front of me, in my husband's bathrobe, on her knees on my floor, and she picks up the sonogram with her fingers. She looks at it for a moment. She straightens. She looks at me. She is taller than me by three inches. She holds the sonogram up between us, between her thumb and her finger, like a small dirty thing. "Adrian, darling," she calls out, in a clear voice that carries down the hallway. "Could you come into the kitchen, please. Your wife is here. And she has brought a present." The bathroom door opens. Adrian steps out into the hallway in nothing but a white towel around his hips. His hair is wet. His chest is wet. He has the small white scar near his left shoulder blade that I have asked him about a hundred times and that he has never explained. He sees me. He stops. For one full second the only sound in the apartment is the small steady drip of water from his hair onto our hardwood floor. He looks at me. He looks at the woman in his bathrobe. He looks at the sonogram in her hand. He looks back at me. His face does not change. His eyes go cold. Not surprised. Not panicked. Not anything. Cold. He looks at me the way a man looks at an inconvenience. "Anaïs." That is all. He says my name the way you say the name of a problem you are about to handle. The woman in the bathrobe walks toward him. She walks past me as if I am not standing in my own kitchen. She walks down the hallway in his bathrobe, on her bare feet, with my sonogram in her hand, and she walks up to my husband, and she puts her free hand flat on his bare wet chest. She turns her head and looks back at me. She smiles. "Adrian," she says, very softly. "Tell her." He does not look at the woman. He looks at me. "Anaïs." "What." My voice is not my voice. "Vienna and I have something to tell you." I cannot see. The kitchen is very bright. I cannot see anything except his face, and his face has gone harder than I have ever seen it, and behind him the woman, Vienna, is leaning her cheek against his bare shoulder. "Tell me," I say. "Vienna is pregnant." The world stops. He says it the way he announces a quarter earnings call. Flat. Direct. No softness at the edges. "Vienna is pregnant," he says again, "and the child is mine, and I am going to acknowledge the child publicly. We are telling you now because the announcement goes out tomorrow morning, and I did not want you to find out from the press." I look at my husband. I look at the woman pressed against his bare shoulder. I look at the sonogram still in her hand. My sonogram. Of my child. That she is now holding, casually, against his ribs. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. Vienna lifts the sonogram. She tilts her head at it. She tilts her head at me. "And what is this, sweetheart." Adrian's eyes flick down. He sees the sonogram. For one half second, something moves in his face. Something that is not cold. Something that is not flat. Something that is, for a single half second, the man I married fourteen months ago. Then it is gone. He looks back up at me. "Anaïs." "Yes." "You are not pregnant." I stare at him. "What." "You are not pregnant. You cannot be pregnant. We have not slept together in eleven weeks." The kitchen tilts. I count backward in my head. I count the way I count anything when my hands are starting to shake. Eleven weeks. He is right. He is right. Eleven weeks ago he came home from London and I made him pasta and he kissed me on the mouth for the last time, and after that there has been nothing. I have been telling myself he was busy. I have been telling myself he was tired. I have been telling myself he loved me. Ten weeks pregnant. Eleven weeks since he last touched me. I am pregnant by my husband. But by his math, in front of his mistress, in our kitchen, my husband has just told a woman in his bathrobe that I cannot possibly be carrying his child. Vienna laughs. It is a real laugh. Warm. Almost pitying. "Oh, Adrian," she says. "Oh, my poor Adrian. Whose is it, then." I open my mouth. He is mine. The pasta. Eleven weeks. The math is mine. The math is right. The midwife confirmed it. Ten weeks. Ten weeks pregnant means conception ten weeks ago, plus two weeks of cycle, twelve weeks since my last period, which means. I open my mouth. I count again, faster this time. I have been working too many shifts. I have been losing track of time. The pasta night was twelve weeks ago, not eleven. Twelve. He is right that we have not slept together in eleven weeks. He is wrong that we have not slept together in twelve. The pasta night was twelve weeks ago, and ten weeks pregnant means I conceived twelve weeks ago, which means. I close my mouth. I look at my husband. I look at his cold face. I look at the woman pressed against his shoulder. I look at her hand, holding the sonogram of my baby, lazily, against his ribs. I make a decision. It happens in less than a second. I make a decision the way I make decisions in the operating theatre when something has gone wrong and someone is going to die and there is no time. I lift my chin. I look at my husband. I say, "You are right, Adrian." He blinks. It is the first time I have ever seen Adrian Whitmore blink at something I said. "You are right," I say. "It is not yours." Vienna's smile gets wider. Adrian's face does not move, but something in his eyes flickers. Not relief. Not surprise. Something darker. Something colder. "It is not mine," he says, slowly. "No." "Then whose is it." I look at him. I look at the woman in his bathrobe. I look at the sonogram in her hand. I think of every man I have spent more than thirty seconds alone with in the last twelve weeks. Coworkers. Patients. Donors at my foundation. Men in elevators. Men at coffee shops. One name comes to me. I have only said this name to myself once. In my head. Two days ago. In the pediatric surgery wing, when a tall dark haired man in a five thousand dollar suit was sitting beside the bed of his five year old niece, and he looked up at me, and he said, in a voice softer than I expected, doctor, you saved her life, you saved my whole world, ask me for anything you need. He had pressed a card into my hand. He had said, anything. Rafael Cruz Montenegro. The richest man in Mexico. The uncle of the little girl whose heart I had repaired three days ago. A man who has, since two days ago, been calling my office once an hour to ask if I will have dinner with him. A man I have been ignoring. A man whose card is, at this moment, in my purse on the kitchen island, two feet from Vienna's hand. I open my mouth. I look at my husband. I say, in a voice I do not recognize as my own, the loudest thing I have ever said inside this apartment. "It is Rafael's." Vienna goes still. Adrian's head turns half an inch. "Rafael." "Rafael Cruz Montenegro." Adrian's hand moves very slightly at his side. The hand that is not holding the towel. It curls into a fist. "You are pregnant," he says, slowly, "with Rafael Cruz Montenegro's child." "Yes." "Anaïs." "Yes." "You are lying." I lift the velvet box from the floor. I lift the sonogram out of Vienna's fingers. I do not touch her. I take the picture of my baby out of her hand and I put it back into the velvet box, and I close the box, and I hold it against my chest. I look at my husband. "Maybe I am, Adrian." I look at Vienna. "Maybe I am not." I turn around. I walk out of the kitchen. I walk back down the hallway, past the framed photograph from our wedding day, past the small table with the keys he never uses, into the foyer of the apartment my husband bought me as a wedding gift. Behind me I hear my husband say my name. Once. Twice. The third time he is shouting it. "Anaïs." I do not turn around. I open the front door. I walk out into the hallway. I press the elevator button. I am still holding the velvet box against my chest. The elevator doors open. I step inside. The doors begin to close. At the last possible second, a hand catches the door. The doors slide back open. My husband is standing in the hallway in nothing but a white towel and bare feet on the cold stone of the corridor, with water still dripping from his hair, with his hand on the elevator door, and his face is no longer cold. His face is the face of a man who has lost his mind. "Anaïs." I do not move. He looks at me. For one second, in the elevator hallway of our building, with a stranger possibly watching from a security camera, my husband Adrian Whitmore, who has not kissed me on the mouth in eleven weeks, who has just told me a woman in our kitchen is carrying his child, looks at me like he has never looked at anything in his life. "Whose is it," he says. His voice is hoarse. "Whose child, Anaïs. Tell me. Right now." I look at him. I think of the cup with the lipstick on the rim. I think of the bathrobe. I think of eleven weeks. I lift my chin. I say, very softly, "Move your hand, Adrian." "Anaïs." "Move your hand." He does not move. I reach out. I take his wrist in my fingers, the way I have taken his wrist a hundred times, the way I took his wrist in our wedding photo as the priest blessed our hands. I lift his hand off the elevator door. I let it go. The doors begin to close. I look at him through the closing gap. The last thing I see is his face. The cold gone. The flatness gone. A man in a towel in a hallway watching the elevator take his wife away. The doors close. The elevator begins to descend. I stand alone in the elevator. I look down at the velvet box in my hands. I open it. I look at the small grey shape of my child. For the first time today, I let myself cry.