CHAPTER FOUR

{Ava's POV}

I watched Adrian step out of the room to take his call and felt my shoulders sink under the weight of something I was too tired to name. The nerve of him — walking in here with that blank, impenetrable expression, as though I was the one who had done something wrong. As though I was the one who owed an explanation.

Movement at the edge of my vision pulled my attention away from the door.

Vivian stepped closer to the bed, and the smile she wore was the kind that never quite reached the eyes — polished and deliberate, the smile of a woman who had decided exactly what she wanted to say before she opened her mouth.

"Congratulations on the baby," she said warmly, as though she meant it. Then she tilted her head slightly. "But I hope you understand, Ava, that a child does not change anything. If anything, it might speed things along. Adrian despises you — everyone around him knows it — and now that you have delivered, there is very little reason for him to keep this arrangement going. You clinging to him the way you do is honestly quite sad, knowing full well where his heart has always been."

I said nothing. I kept my eyes on her face and my arms steady around my daughter.

"He spent the entire last twenty-four hours with me," she continued, her voice dropping into something almost conversational, almost kind. "Not once did he think about you. Not once did he reach for his phone to check on you. You and your daughter will always be the other option, Ava. The obligation. And honestly?" She paused, letting the next part land with full deliberate weight. "I might even be carrying his child right now."

Then she reached into her bag, pulled out her phone, and held the screen toward me.

My jaw locked.

The image was Adrian — his chest bare, his eyes closed, relaxed in a way I had never once seen him in the ten months we had lived under the same roof. And beside him, pressed against him, was Vivian. Her expression in the photo was the same as the one she was wearing right now. Satisfied. Certain. Completely at home.

Work. The word turned over slowly in my mind. He had work. Something urgent. Something that could not wait.

Of course he had.

Of course he had chosen to spend the night of my labor, the night our daughter came into the world, wrapped around another woman in a hotel room somewhere across the city. Of course that was where his urgency had been.

Vivian slipped the phone back into her bag with the easy composure of someone who had just played a card she had been holding for a very long time. "I would advise you to start thinking about walking away," she said simply. "Adrian belongs to me. He always has. The sooner you accept that, the better it will be for everyone — including your daughter."

She stepped back and folded her hands neatly in front of her, her point made, her smile still perfectly in place.

I said nothing.

I focused on my breathing instead — slowly, in and out — because my chest was clenching so tightly that it was beginning to hurt, and my heart was moving at a pace that felt almost painful. 

I had suspected it. 

For months, the suspicion had lived quietly at the back of my mind, surfacing every time Adrian mentioned her name with that particular warmth, every time I tried to raise the subject and he buried me under a landslide of insults and accusations until I let it go. I had pushed the suspicion down each time, telling myself I was imagining things, telling myself it was not my place to ask.

Now I had the answer in a photograph, and I almost wanted to laugh.

I had spent ten months in this marriage absorbing blame for something I had not done, punishing myself daily for my brother's crime as though the guilt was mine to carry. I had made myself quiet, made myself small, swallowed every cruel word Adrian threw at me and told myself it was deserved. And what had all that silence and timidity given me?

It had given every single person in my life a clear and open path to walk directly over me whenever they felt like it.

Vivian was right about one thing. I had been weak. Breathtakingly, inexcusably weak.

My daughter stirred in my arms and I looked down at her.

Her eyes were closed, her tiny face completely at peace, entirely unaware of the kind of world she had been born into. I looked at her and felt the tightening in my chest shift into something else — something harder and more purposeful than grief.

I am so sorry, I thought, tracing the curve of her cheek with the tip of my finger. I am so sorry your mother has been such a coward.

But not anymore.

I would not raise her watching me shrink. I would not be the first example she ever had of what a woman looked like — head down, voice swallowed, absorbing every blow from every direction without ever once pushing back. She deserved better than that. She deserved a mother who stood up. A mother who fought. A mother who took what was hers and refused to apologize for it.

I looked at my daughter's face and made her a silent promise.

I was done.

Done being Daniel's puppet. Done being Adrian's punching bag. Done blaming myself for a crime I had not committed and paying daily for a debt that was never mine. The guilt I had been carrying like a stone around my neck for ten months — I was putting it down. Right here, right now, in this hospital room.

I was going to be strong. For the first time in my life, I was going to be strong, and I was going to take back everything that had been taken from me.

The door opened and Adrian came back in, his expression as unreadable as ever. I looked away before his eyes could find mine, and I kept my gaze on the window when he approached the bed.

"Do you need anything?" he asked.

I shook my head.

"I am going to head home, shower, and change. I will be back shortly."

I nodded once, still not looking at him. A moment later I heard his footsteps moving toward the door, and then Vivian's lighter ones following behind him, and then the soft click of the latch as the door closed, and then silence.

They discharged us four days later.

Adrian was not there.

He had visited twice during our stay — brief appearances, both of them, long enough to look at our daughter and exchange a handful of words before leaving again. I had stopped checking my phone for his name after the second day. I had stopped expecting him entirely by the third.

On the morning of our discharge, I packed our things quietly, dressed my daughter in the small white outfit Mrs. Chen had brought from home, and booked a taxi from my phone while the nurse completed the paperwork. No fuss. No waiting. No calling anyone who was not going to come.

The drive home was quiet and the afternoon light was soft through the taxi window, and I kept my daughter against my chest the whole way and did not think about Adrian once.

He was not home when we arrived. He was not home two hours later when I had settled my daughter into her crib and eaten something small in the kitchen. He was not home when the evening came and the house grew still and dark outside the windows.

By nine o'clock, I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my daughter sleeping soundly in the crib across the room, my phone in my hand, and a stillness in my chest that felt nothing like peace but everything like resolve.

I opened my contacts and found the number I had been thinking about since the hospital. My father's old business partner. His most trusted friend, the one who had always believed in my mother's vision for the company long before my father had the chance to run it into the ground.

I stared at the number for a moment.

Then I typed: I need your help. I would love to come back to the company and take my leadership position as soon as possible.

I read it once. Then I pressed send.