Sign The Papers!

She didn't gasp. She didn't freeze. She didn't do any of the things a person did when they'd been caught doing something unforgivable. She just looked at me, and slowly, the laughter in her expression reshaped itself into something else entirely. Something I had never seen on her face before, even though I'd known this face for ten years.

"Oh, darling." She surveyed the candles, the petals, the two crystal glasses. Her voice was honeyed and amused. "Someone set the mood for us, baby." She turned to Tyler, pressing her fingers against his chest. "Isn't it perfect?"

*Baby.*

The word went through me like a blade.

My legs were shaking. My mouth opened but nothing came out because there was no sentence in any language I spoke that fit what was happening in front of me.

"What—" My voice was barely mine. "What is this? What is going on?"

Lucy walked across the room without hesitation and reached for the light switch on the wall beside the dresser. The romance died instantly, everything harsh and bright and exposed. She stood there looking at my carefully arranged dinner table the way someone looked at a child's drawing. Amused. Slightly pitiful.

Something cold moved through me. How did she know where the light switch was?

In ten years of friendship — of late nights and shared secrets and crying on each other's shoulders — Lucy had never once set foot in my bedroom. Tyler had insisted on it. *The bedroom is private,* he always said. *Our space.* And I had never questioned it because I trusted him. Because I trusted her.

Because I was an idiot.

"Cover yourself." Tyler's voice cut across the room, and I flinched like I'd been struck. He wasn't looking at me with anger or hurt or even surprise. He was looking at me the way you looked at something you were embarrassed to have ever touched. "I mean it, Sarah. Put something on."

My hands moved before I thought to move them. I grabbed the robe from the chair behind me and pulled it closed around my body, fumbling with the belt. I hated that the first thing I felt was shame, that I was standing in my own bedroom covering myself up because he had looked at me like that.

"So this is what you do." His voice rose. "The moment I leave, you turn my home into — what? A playground? Were you expecting someone tonight, Sarah? One of your men?"

"Our anniversary," I said. The words felt like they belonged to a different language. "Tyler, it's our anniversary. I did this for—"

"The men, Sarah." His voice echoed off the walls and I felt it in my sternum. "The men you've been seeing behind my back. Is that who you were waiting for tonight? Is that who gets the gold lingerie and the expensive wine?"

The accusation hit me so hard the room tilted. "What men? Tyler, what are you — there are no men, there has never been anyone but you, what are you—"

"There is nothing you can do that will surprise me anymore." He cut me off cleanly, the way you cut something you'd decided to throw away. "Seven years. Seven years and all you've done is eat my money and disappoint me. You can't even give me the one thing I asked for."

I looked at him. Then I looked at Lucy.

Lucy, who had called me twenty minutes ago and told me to breathe. Lucy, who had said *that's what best friends are for.* Lucy, who was standing in my bedroom with her hand flat against my husband's chest, unmoved, watching me come apart with the patient expression of someone who had been waiting a long time for this exact moment.

"I think," Lucy said lightly, "your wife looks confused. Should we clear things up?"

Tyler reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded envelope. He didn't hand it to me. He dropped it. It fell open at my feet, pages fanning across the rose petals I had laid out by hand that afternoon.

"Sign it," he said. "And get out of my house."

I stared at the papers. The word DIVORCE at the top of the first page.

"No." My voice surprised me. It was quiet, but it was there. "Tyler, listen to me. I know we've been struggling. I know this year has been hard. But things are about to change... I am about to change everything, because I'm..."

"We have an announcement." Lucy stepped forward, and there was something almost theatrical about the timing, the way she placed herself between us. Her hand moved to her own stomach. Flat. Still. But the gesture was unmistakable. "Tyler is going to be a father."

The floor felt unsteady beneath my heels.

"She's giving me what you never could." Tyler's voice was almost gentle now, which was worse than the anger. "In seven years, you gave me nothing. The prenup is clear. You leave the way you arrived. I'll have your things packed by morning."

Lucy tilted her head at me, something glittering behind her eyes. "I was going to send you an invitation to the wedding," she said. "But I think we both know that would be cruel." She said it like she was doing me a favor.

"Get out of this room." Tyler's voice was very quiet now. The quietest it had been all night.

I walked out.

The hallway was dark and long and I moved through it without feeling my feet, without feeling much of anything, until somewhere near the top of the staircase my knees simply stopped holding me and I went down onto the cold hardwood floor, with the sounds of my husband's laughter drifting from behind the closed door.

Something fell from inside my robe. I looked down. The pregnancy test lay on the floor between my hands, its two pink lines staring up at me.

Tonight was supposed to be the best night of my life. Of our lives.

I pressed my palm over my mouth. Behind the closed door, Lucy laughed again — that laugh I had loved for ten years — and I realized that the worst part wasn't the betrayal.

The worst part was that the child growing inside me would never know his father's name.