He Gave My Bed To His Mistress, So I Took Everything

VIVIAN'S POV

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Lowe. We can't file this under your name."

I blinked at the nurse behind the desk, my hand still pressed flat over the folder of prenatal paperwork I'd spent three years and more needles than I could count trying to earn.

"What do you mean you can't file it?"

"Your husband already has an open file with us. Under a different wife."

The word hung there, ordinary as a stapled form, and something in my chest folded in on itself.

"That's not possible." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Nathaniel and I have been married five years. There's no other wife."

She wouldn't meet my eyes. "The marriage certificate he provided, the ID, they match a different woman's records. She registered with us two weeks ago. For a pregnancy."

I laughed. An actual laugh, short and ugly, one that didn't belong to me. A clerical error. A duplicate name in the system. Nathaniel called me every night he was away, told me he missed me, asked what color we should paint the nursery we hadn't started yet. A man planning a life with someone else does not do that.

I told myself that all the way down in the elevator. I was still telling myself that when I stepped into the lobby and saw him.

Nathaniel, six feet away, one hand splayed warm and familiar over the curve of a stranger's stomach.

She couldn't have been older than twenty. Pretty in the soft, unfinished way of someone who'd never had to fight for anything. I knew her face. Chloe, my husband's business partner's daughter, a decade younger than him and forever finding reasons to be wherever he was.

"Do you think the baby will look more like you or me?" she asked, looping her arms around his neck like it was nothing. Like there wasn't a wife three feet away holding a folder with her name crossed out of it.

"However it comes out, it'll be perfect," Nathaniel said. The voice he used with me. The exact same voice.

They walked past without seeing me. I don't know how long I stood there after they'd gone, staring at the space where he'd been, waiting for the ground to make sense again.

I followed them. I don't know why some part of me needed to see how far the lie went. I trailed their car in a cab to a private club, stood outside a back room while his friends toasted him for having the best of both worlds, a devoted wife at home and Chloe on his arm everywhere else. They called her sister-in-law. They'd clearly known for a long time.

Everyone had known but me.

Someone lost a drinking game. The punishment was a kiss, and Nathaniel didn't hesitate.

I watched him through the gap in the door and felt the last five years come apart like wet paper.

I still refused to believe what my eyes saw. I went to the registry office.

A clerk with careful, kind eyes confirmed it. There was no record of my marriage. Nathaniel had told me once that he was too busy to file the paperwork himself, that he'd have someone do it on his behalf. I hadn't questioned it. Why would I? He'd spent three years convincing me he was worth the risk — a hand-designed necklace on every holiday, learning to make the ginger tea that helped with my cramps, refusing to disappear no matter how many times I told him I didn't do relationships. He'd nearly died shielding me from an avalanche in Switzerland, spent a month in a coma while I sat by his bed promising every God I didn't believe in that I'd love him properly if he woke up.

He woke up. I kept my promise. I just apparently hadn't been the only one he'd made it to.

When I couldn't get pregnant — when the shots and the appointments and his mother's pointed silence at dinner started wearing me down to something brittle — I told myself it didn't matter, that we'd get there. I quit my job so the stress wouldn't show. I kept taking the injections even after the skin around them went hot and swollen. I did all of it so I could hand him this exact child, now sitting in a folder with someone else's name attached to it.

The doctor's question, when I went back to correct the file, was gentle. "You're certain you don't want to keep it?"

I touched my stomach and nodded, because grief has a strange way of narrowing down to logistics when it can't survive as feeling.

"All right. We'll run some tests first, then talk about the procedure."

I was in the waiting room when Nathaniel called. My thumb slipped and answered before I could stop it.

"Vivi, you're at the hospital? Are you hurt?" His face filled the screen, brows drawn in exactly the concern I used to find unbearably sweet.

I wanted to hold the phone up to that concerned face and ask him whose baby he'd been touching an hour ago.

Instead I said I was fine, that I was just there with Lauren for a stomach thing, that he should stay and finish his trip. I said it evenly. I have apparently always been better at lying to protect him than he ever was at lying to me.

"I love you, Vivi," he said, before hanging up, and I let the words land somewhere far away where they couldn't reach anything important.

The results came back within the hour. My endometrium had thinned — from the injections, the doctor guessed, or simply from three years of my body being asked for something it couldn't give. If I went through with the procedure now, I might never carry another child.

Ever.

I sat with that a long moment. I could live without Nathaniel. I'd already started, somewhere in the last three hours, learning how. But I didn't know if I could survive losing this too, the one thing five years of trying had finally, finally given me.

"Take some time," the doctor said kindly. "This isn't a decision to rush."

I walked out into a gray, indifferent sky and didn't see the car until it was almost on me. My foot caught the curb. The ground tilted.

A hand closed around my waist before I hit the pavement.

I looked up into a pair of black eyes I had never seen in my life, and for one strange, suspended second, the noise in my head went completely, blessedly quiet.