Pregnant the Night My Billionaire Husband Divorced Me

Eliana POV

Grayson didn't take off his coat.

At twenty to ten his car came into the drive, and the engine never stopped. Then he was standing in the dining room doorway with rain on his shoulders, looking at the wall above my head instead of at me.

The ladle was in my hand. Two places at one end of a table that seats twelve, and tomato soup with basil, his favorite, reheated once already because he was late. The test was in the pocket of my cardigan, two lines.

One sentence was ready, practiced in the bathroom mirror that afternoon and again in the car. I'm pregnant, Grayson. He liked plain words.

"Eliana. Sit down." He kept his hands deep in his coat pockets.

"Dinner's ready."

"I see that. You shouldn't have gone to the trouble." He still hadn't looked at the soup.

"It's soup." He didn't smile. Early on, he would have.

"We need to talk." I put the ladle down and sat. He stayed standing, which he did when a meeting was going to be short.

"I want a divorce."

I waited for the rest of the sentence. There wasn't one. The soup had stopped steaming, and I understood the coat then. He hadn't planned to stay long enough to take it off.

"Why?"

"Cali Kelly is alive."

My thumb hit my wedding band, turning it twice around my knuckle. Then I put both hands flat on the table. They were steady, which surprised me.

I knew the name. He had said it once, on our first anniversary, looking out the window, when he'd had too much wine, and I never asked. A girl from before me took a hit meant for him and died of it. That was all the family had ever told me.

"Alive."

"She came to my office on Monday."

"It's Thursday."

"I needed to be sure it was her." He stopped and started again. "She was hurt badly. They told me she was dead and I... let them. I left that hospital and I never checked." He looked down at his wet sleeves. "She's been out there this whole time."

"Where?"

"Abroad. In treatment." He went on faster. "She's sick, Eliana. The doctors give her six months. Maybe less."

"Which doctors?" She had a letter from a clinic in Zurich.

"You read it?" He took a second too long. "I read enough. I'm not going to question a dying woman."

"I didn't say question."

"Enough." It was the voice he used on the board, flat and final. He had never used it on me, because he had never needed to.

Zurich stayed with me. I remember details. It's the only habit of mine he ever noticed.

He waited a few seconds before he went on, lower.

"She wants one thing. She wants to spend the time she has left as my wife."

"Your wife."

"It's a dying wish."

"I am your wife."

"I know that." He had decided all of this before he got out of the car, and I could hear it. "She says she won't ask me to choose. She only wants the time."

"I owe her my life, Eliana."

"I know what you owe her." For seven years I had lived with what he owed a dead girl.

"Then you know I can't say no."

"And after the six months?" He hadn't thought about after. I believed him.

"Where is she tonight?" Somewhere she was being looked after. "By whom?" He answered with my name, only my name, and that was the end of the subject.

"Does she know you're married?" "She knows. She understands." He was still wearing his ring.

"That's generous of her." He took out his phone, looked at the screen, and put it face down on the table.

"How long have you known?"

"Since Monday. I told you."

"Four days." I looked at the plates. "Four days, and I set the table."

"I couldn't say it over the phone."

"You could have texted me not to cook." He almost answered that, and then he didn't.

"My father knows." His voice stayed flat. "Grandmother hears tomorrow. The board will understand. They remember what happened to her."

I waited to see if he would say anything about me.

"It will be in the papers by the weekend. I'd rather you heard it from me."

"I'm hearing it from you."

He nodded once. "Nobody is going to make this hard on her. Not the press, not the family. I've made that clear."

"And me?"

"My lawyers will send the terms tomorrow. You'll be looked after."

"I don't need to be looked after." He looked at me then, the first time since he'd come in. "You've always understood things. I counted on that."

"I know you did."

I had understood all of it. The late nights. The canceled trips. The week every March he stopped talking.

The test was in my pocket and I put my hand over it. I opened my mouth and the sentence was right there, every word of it, and then his phone lit up on the table and he turned it over without looking.

I closed my mouth. The plan had been to put the test next to his plate after the soup and watch him work it out, and I wasn't going to hand him the best news of my life between a phone call and a lawyer.

Seven years, and he picked tonight.

The first year he asked if I minded that he worked late. I said no. I kept saying no, and by the second year he had stopped asking and I had stopped saying it.

He picked up the folder at the end of the table, the quarterly refinancing summary he had left out that morning under a note that read sign and return. I had been through it at six. There was a pencil mark in the margin of page three where a figure had an extra zero.

He found the pen without looking for it and signed under my mark without reading it. He squared the folder against the edge of the table, lined up the corners, and pulled his hand back.

I had expected a lot of things when his car came in. A kiss on my head. A question about the soup. Not this, and not with his coat on.

"Do you still love her?"

He didn't answer. He looked at the soup, then at the clock, and then past me at the window behind my chair.

I turned around. The headlights were still on in the drive and the wipers were still going, and someone was sitting in the passenger seat.

I didn't need to ask who.