CHAPTER 1: The Good News

Ana's POV 

I had three weeks, one red dress, and one last plan to save my marriage. And I used all of it on a man who was already inside another woman.

But I didn't know that yet.

I checked my reflection one last time and smoothed the dress down over my hips. Deep red. The one Sebastian used to love, back when he still looked at me like I was the only door in a room full of windows. It still fit. I told myself that was a good sign.

Two years. We can fix two years.

The table at Lavelle was perfect. Corner by the window, the whole city glittering below us like something I had paid for. Two bottles of his wine, chilling. The lamb he always ordered without reading the menu. I had even called ahead and asked them to play our first-dance song the moment we sat down.

I sat alone instead.

Forty minutes. The candle burned down a full inch while I kept my chin level and my hands folded and my smile bolted on. The waiter came by three times with that soft, pitying face people make at a woman who has clearly been left.

I called him.

It rang once and died. Not voicemail. Cut off. The kind of dead a call goes when a man sees your name and presses the button to send you away.

Then the text lit up my face in the dark.

“Can't make it. Something to finish at the office.”

I read it four times, and every time the words got smaller and meaner. Something to finish. Like our anniversary was a chore he hadn't gotten to. Like I was a meeting he could move.

I should have gone home.

But I had a doctor's voice living in my head now, eight months and counting. “The womb is ruptured. There won't be children. Not ever.” I had watched my husband let go of my hand in that office, three minutes in, and I had been chasing the warmth of him ever since. Through the late nights. Through the cold side of the bed.

I am not losing him too. Not without one more try.

So I did the stupid, hopeful thing. I boxed up the lamb, wrapped the wine, and drove across the city in my red dress to bring the celebration to him.

His floor was the thirtieth. Dark, except for the glow under his office door.

I almost knocked. God, I almost knocked. If I had, he would have had a few seconds to make it a lie I could live inside. But I was feeling brave. I turned the handle instead.

The door opened on a sound.

A sound I didn't understand for one whole second, and then my body understood it before my mind would let me, and the box slid out of my hands and hit the floor.

Sebastian was on the couch.

Not working. Not resting. He had a woman under him, her legs locked around his back, his shirt flung across the desk, and he was moving into her with an ease that only comes from practice. Not a stranger. Not a mistake. Practice.

She turned her head and looked at me over his shoulder.

And she didn't flinch.

Nicole.

The business partner. The name he said too easily at dinner. The woman I had seen a hundred times and chosen, every single time, not to see.

The wine bottles rolled out of the fallen box and bumped against the leg of his desk. That small, stupid sound was the loudest thing in the room.

For one breath I was back at our wedding. Sebastian's hands shaking as he slid the ring on my finger. The way he had whispered that he would spend his whole life making sure I never felt alone again. I had believed him. I had built my entire world on that one sentence.

Sebastian scrambled back like a boy caught stealing, snatching his shirt up against his chest. His face tried to be three things at once and managed none of them.

"Ana." My name came out of him like an apology he hadn't finished writing. "Ana, it is not what you think."

"It is exactly what I think." My voice didn't shake. I don't know how, but it didn't shake.

Nicole didn't move.

She sat up slowly. Unhurried. She slid the strap of her dress back onto her shoulder like she had all the time in the world, and she looked me over. The dress. The makeup. The hope I hadn't wiped off my face fast enough.

"Oh," she said, and her mouth curved. "You went to so much trouble."

My heart was slamming so hard I could feel it in my teeth. But I kept my voice flat.

"Get out, Nicole."

"Why would I?" She tipped her head, almost gentle. "You can't give him anything in here, can you? Not a real night. Not a child. Not a future." She laid the words down one at a time, placed like a knife on a table. "You're barren, Ana. A dried-up little thing in a pretty dress. What exactly did you come here to save?"

The edges of the room went white at that moment.

I took one step towards her. I don't know what I meant to do. Slap the smile off her face. Drag her off that couch by her perfect hair. Something. Anything that would make the burning in my chest stop.

But my legs wouldn't carry me. They had quit, the way the rest of me wanted to.

I looked at my husband. My Sebastian. The man whose hand I had held in that doctor's office before he let mine go.

"Tell her she's wrong," I whispered. My voice cracked straight down the middle. "Tell her something. Tell her anything."

He looked at the floor.

He looked at the wine.

He looked at Nicole.

He looked everywhere but at me.

"She's not wrong," he said.

Quiet. Final. After two years, three words.

I felt it go. I felt the exact second the last living thing in my marriage stopped breathing, right there on the floor, between the rolling bottles and the cooling lamb and the woman wearing my husband like a borrowed coat. 

I didn't cry. I want you to know that. I stood in that doorway in my beautiful red dress and I didn't give them a single tear.

Nicole stared at me with a slow, patient smile. The smile of a woman who had already won and was just waiting for me to read the scoreboard.

Then she laid a hand flat against her stomach.

"Besides," she said softly. "One of us has good news."