Chapter 2- the name

“You don’t get to walk away from this, Ines.”

My voice bounced off the hallway walls, sharper than I meant it to be. I’d caught up to her outside the office, past the reception desk, past a nurse who looked between us like she was deciding whether to intervene.

Ines stopped. Not because I’d asked. Because there was nowhere left to go without shoving past me.

“Noelle—”

“No.” I stepped in front of her so she couldn’t sidestep me again. “You don’t get to say ‘recognizable foundation’ and then just walk. You don’t get to make calls first. I’ve been sitting in that room for twenty minutes finding out my husband isn’t the father of my own baby, and you are going to tell me whose baby I’m carrying right now.”

Her jaw tightened.

For a second I thought she’d fight me on it, pull rank, or hide behind patient confidentiality, whatever doctors hid behind when the truth was too big to hand over standing up.

Instead, she glanced past me, down the hallway, like she needed to make sure no one else was close enough to hear.

“Reyes,” she said quietly. “The sample came from Dorian Reyes.”

The name didn’t sound familiar to me,but from the way she said it he is important. “Who is—“

“Dr Ines?” A nurse called looking at the both of us, confused if it was the wrong timing

“I have to go now,take care of yourself and the baby” she said before leaving me.

Ines was already walking away, the nurse falling into step beside her, both of them disappearing around the corner before I could get another word out.

I stood there in the hallway, phone still clutched in my hand from the call with Trent, and typed the name before I’d even decided to.

Dorian Reyes.

The results loaded slower than my heartbeat.

Dorian Reyes, 34, founder and CEO of Reyes Logistics Group. Net worth estimated at $2.8 billion. Ranked #3 on this year’s Forbes Under 40 list. Widower, wife Camille Reyes passed three years ago following complications from—

I kept scrolling. Photos. Him in a suit exiting a building I recognized from the news. Him cutting a ribbon at a children’s hospital wing that bore his late wife’s name. Him not smiling in a single picture.

I didn’t know this man. I had never met this man. I had, as far as I could remember, never so much as stood in the same room as this man.

And somehow, I was carrying his child.

I locked the phone and shoved it into my pocket, like that would undo what I’d just read,then my hand nervously rested on my lower belly. Tears welling in my eyes, what was I going to tell Trent now?

I made it to my car before the first sob broke loose.

I didn’t even fully close the door, just sat there with one leg still hanging out, my forehead against the steering wheel, and let it happen. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere lower than your chest, that doesn’t care if anyone in the parking lot can see you.

By the time I calmed down, I had spent thirty minutes in the parking lot and when I had pulled into the driveway, I’d scrubbed my face with the sleeve of my cardigan so many times it was damp. I needed him. Even though I couldn’t tell him any of it, not yet, maybe not ever, some small, stupid part of me still wanted Trent to hold me and tell me it would be fine, the way he used to before we started counting days on a fertility calendar instead of just living our lives.

I called him but no answer, but his car was in the driveway.

I found him in the bedroom, just alone, a manila folder open on the dresser like he hadn’t expected me home this early. I recognized the letterhead before I let myself admit what I was looking at.

Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.

Dated three weeks ago.

Three weeks. Before the ultrasound. Before any of this. He’d already signed his name at the bottom in his cramped, slanted handwriting, like it had been an easy decision to make.

“That’s not—” Trent started, reaching for the folder like he could put it away and undo my having seen it.

“Three weeks,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

“You’ve had this for three weeks?.”