CHAPTER 2

Alice

I barged into the room. And yes, I couldn’t hold back for another second.

My heart was already slamming against my ribs so hard it felt like it would shatter right inside me.

“Who… who is pregnant?” I asked, my voice trembling so badly I barely recognized it. “Did you just say she is pregnant? And that she is his wife?”

Deafening silence. That was what answered me.

Nobody could offer answers, or nobody wanted to.

I looked at Carolyn, but she looked bored out of her mind as if my world breaking apart in front of her was nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

Then my eyes moved to Charles.

There was no guilt in them. Just raw, pure coldness written all over him.

He looked at me like I was a stranger who had dared to interrupt an important meeting.

For a split second, I searched his eyes, praying to see remorse or even a lie I could pretend to believe. But all I got was a blank stare.

“Tell me it’s not true, Charles,” I whispered, tears welling up in my eyes until his face blurred into a smudge. “Please.”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t step toward me.

He didn’t even let go of Carolyn’s hand.

Seven years. Seven long years of sitting home alone, crying into my pillow, wondering why I wasn’t good enough to give him a family and forcing myself to swallow those birth control pills because he claimed he wasn’t ready to be a father. And all this time, he was getting ready with someone else.

“So, you did want a child,” I said, a bitter laugh escaping my throat as a sob threatened to burst through. “But you just didn’t want mine.”

That humiliation clung to me like gum on jeans and I couldn’t stand another second of his coldness.

Without waiting for another word, I turned on my heels and walked out.

Immediately I felt the cold air on my face from outside the hospital, the tears came. I kept my head down, rushing toward the car waiting in the driveway. Every breath felt like inhaling shattered glass.

The drive back to the Reynolds mansion was very quiet and devastating. My driver kept his eyes on the road, ignoring the muffled sniffs coming from the backseat. All I could think about was the confrontation that was bound to happen the moment Charles set foot through the front door.

When I got home, I immediately went upstairs, washed the tear stains off my face, and changed into clean clothes. Then I sat on the couch in the living room, waiting. Every tick of the clock felt like a hammer beating inside my chest.

It wasn’t long before I heard the heavy click of the front door opening.

Charles walked in, tossing his car keys onto the entryway table.

“What the hell was that, Charles?” I asked. My voice wasn’t loud enough, but in the empty living room, it cut right through the air.

​“What do you think I should have done, Alice?” he asked, stopping in his tracks with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his jaw set in that tight line I knew all too well. “Look at you. You can barely handle your daily treatments without collapsing. We both know your body couldn’t survive a pregnancy—I did what had to be done for this family.”

“So that justifies holding another woman's hand?” I gasped, standing up from the couch. “You went behind my back and—”

“It’s a surrogacy!” he blurted out, cutting me off.

I stared at him, stunned into silence for a moment.

Surrogacy?

I knew Charles better than anyone. I knew how he operated, and this wasn’t some innocent surrogacy arrangement. He had spent years telling me he wasn’t ready for a child whenever I begged him to start a family, so what changed?

"It's more complicated than you think,” he shook his head.

“How do you start a surrogacy process without your own wife’s knowledge or consent?” I asked, stepping closer to him.

“Tell me, Charles. What doctor approves a surrogacy without the wife even knowing?”

That shut him up completely. His lips pressed together, but he didn’t have an answer.

I looked at the man I had loved for seven years, feeling a hollow ache in my chest that went deeper than anything I had ever known.

He had denied me a baby for nearly a decade, forcing me to suffer in silence, and now another woman was carrying his child.

And here I was, keeping the ultimate secret: I couldn’t even reveal to my own husband that I was expecting a baby, carrying a life that was going to cost me my own.

Part of me wanted to scream it in his face.

Part of me wanted to tell him the terrifying truth about my health, hoping that maybe, just maybe, a tiny piece of the man I married was still inside him.

I took a shaky breath and opened my mouth, the words coming out before I could overthink it.

“The doctor told me I have just nine months to live.”

He was silent for a while.

He didn't rush to hold me or ask questions. Instead, he stared at me for a few agonizing seconds, and then a small, incredulous smile crept onto his lips.

“Are you really that desperate for attention now, Alice?” he said, his tone dripping with utter disbelief. “Nine months to live? That can’t be true.”

He chuckled softly—a bitter sound that ripped straight through my heart.

“I’ll have Carolyn look into your medical records and run some proper tests,” he added casually. “We’ll see what’s actually going on.”

I decided right then and there. “No,” I answered.

I had to hide my recent medical reports and make sure Carolyn never ran any tests on me. If she got her hands on my records, she would find out about the baby and tell Charles about it.

​“So how am I supposed to believe you?” Charles shook his head, looking at me like I was a child throwing a ridiculous tantrum.

“You’re just getting too emotional, Alice. You’ll always say anything when you’re upset.”

My heart shattered into a million pieces. He didn't believe me. He thought I was lying just to get his attention. Even if Carolyn knew I was going to die, she could not be trusted. She could do anything to make sure Charles believed I was perfectly fine.

Just then, the front door unlocked without so much as a knock, and the devil herself walked in as if on cue.

Carolyn.

She walked in holding her phone in one hand and her designer handbag in the other, casually setting a spare set of keys on the entryway table next to a stack of files. She looked completely relaxed, as if she hadn’t just helped destroy my marriage hours ago.

“At least have some courtesy,” I challenged her. “Who gave you the audacity to walk into my family's house without permission?”

“Oh, I'm very sorry about that,” Carolyn replied, her apology sounding more like an afterthought than genuine remorse. She didn't even bother to meet my eyes.

“You tried to log into the family health insurance today,” she announced, her eyes flicking up from her phone to meet mine.

I stood up straight. “Yes. And the system said I was temporarily suspended.” I folded my arms and looked at her squarely.

Charles also gave her a questioning look. “Suspended? Why?”

Carolyn gave a small, careless shrug. “It was suspended three days ago. It’s just a routine clinical audit. Nothing to worry about, Mr. Reynolds. I’m handling it.”

Calling him 'Mr. Reynolds' now? Ridiculous.

Charles nodded, completely oblivious, but the sly, subtle smile on Carolyn's face told me everything I needed to know. She hadn't just suspended our account. She was systematically cutting off my access to my medication, forcing me to go through her for every single dose.

Thinking about everything now, I didn’t know if I should regret marrying into this family because nobody really liked me.

Everyone was literally against me, and now even Carolyn was playing her twisted game. I could still hear Charles’s elder sister, Susan, echoing in my mind from a few weeks ago when I came back from the hospital with more drugs than the last—hissing that I was a gold-digger draining the Reynolds family fortune with my endless medical bills.

​I used to cry myself to sleep over those words but not tonight.

After taking a long, hot shower to cool my body down, I sat down on my bed and pulled out a notepad from the drawer as a strange sense of clarity seeped in. The pen tapped against the book slowly.

My life couldn’t end like this. I used to have dreams, it’s time those dreams come alive again.

Since I had just nine months to live, I would live my life to the fullest.

The pen glided over the notepad as I created a bucket list titled, ‘Things I Want To Do Before I Die’.

The smile that returned to my face was cut short by the ragged fits of coughing that broke through me.

Within seconds, it already felt like my lungs were tearing apart from the inside.

I clapped my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound, coughing frantically into my palm until the fit slowly subsided, leaving me gasping for air.

Trembling, I pulled my hand from my face.

What shocked me wasn’t the cough, but what I saw when I looked at my hands—bright, wet splatters of deep red smeared across the center of my palm.

Was that… blood?