His Brother's Ex, His Unborn Child

Chapter 10

LIAM

She was pregnant.

I sat with that in my office after Elena left, the elevator doors closing on her reflection. I let the word move through me the way you let cold water move through you.

All at once, unavoidable and clarifying in the worst possible way.

I knew what that meant. I had known for fourteen months what it meant. Ever since I sat in a private clinic on the Upper East Side and received results I had immediately locked in a file I never opened after. The doctor had been careful and thorough and had explained everything in the measured tone.

The results were unambiguous.

I could not father a child.

I had filed the report. I had gone home. I had poured myself a drink and sat at my desk and made the decision that I would never speak of it to anyone — not Elena, not my mother, not the man I looked at in the mirror every morning. The problem, as far as anyone else was concerned, did not exist.

Elena was the problem.

She was the one who couldn't give me what the marriage required. I had been careful about the way I said it but never cruel enough to be memorable. It's never kind enough to be untrue. And Elena, who wanted to believe the best of everyone including me, had believed it.

She had attended specialists alone.

She had cried in the bathroom when she thought I was asleep.

She had stayed.

And now she was pregnant with a child that was not mine.

I stood up. Went to the window. Looked at the city doing its indifferent afternoon thing forty floors below and thought about the night at the lakehouse. About Elena's wine. About the men I had arranged to find her on that porch. About her escaping into a country road at midnight and the hours I had spent driving every road I could find before giving up and going home to wait.

She had turned up the next morning.

With a bandaged hand, she hadn't bandaged herself.

I had noticed that. I set it aside with the things I didn't want to examine too closely. Someone had helped her that night.

Someone had been on that road.

Someone had taken her somewhere safe and she had survived and come home.

I had played the devoted husband so thoroughly that she had believed every word.

And now she was pregnant.

By someone who had been on a dark road on the night I arranged for her to disappear.

I pressed my hand flat against the window glass.

I thought about what this meant for my plan. The divorce I had been building toward — the disgrace and the discarding, the clean exit Chloe had convinced me was necessary. All of that had been before the letter. Before I understood what Elena was actually worth. Now the plan was different. Now the plan required Elena alive and married to me and compliant.

A pregnancy complicated that.

A child that wasn't mine made it worse.

I picked up my phone, the one with the unregistered sim and the one I kept in the inside drawer of my desk at home where Elena had never once looked.

I opened a contact with no name. Just a number.

I need something, I typed. Prenatal vitamins. Modified. Nothing traceable. Nothing that moves too fast. I need it to look like a miscarriage.

I looked at the message for a moment.

Then I sent it.

I put the phone in my jacket pocket and went back to the window and stood there until the reply came.

Three minutes.

Understood. Will arrange. One week.

I put the phone away.

I straightened my jacket and adjusted my tie. I went back to my desk and opened my laptop. I pulled up the Carter Group quarterly report and read it with the focus of a man whose afternoon had contained nothing of significance.

At six o'clock, I went home.

Elena was in the kitchen making dinner. She looked up when I came in and smiled. It was real and unguarded. It's the smile she gave me in moments when she had forgotten to be careful. Something moved through my chest that I didn't examine.

"How was the rest of your day?" she said.

"Good," I said. "Productive."

I set my keys on the counter and kissed her temple. I stood beside her while she stirred something that smelled of garlic and white wine.

I was warm and present and entirely myself.

I do that when it mattered and never miss it. I have been doing it for so long.

That was the thing about acting something for long enough. Eventually you stopped being able to tell where it ended and you began. I had been acting like the devoted husband for four years. The warmth was real now. It just didn't change anything.

"I called my mother," I said. "She wants us for dinner Sunday."

Elena looked at me. "You told her?"

"She's going to find out eventually."

I reached past her and stole a piece of the vegetable she was chopping.

"Better it comes from us."

She nodded slowly. Something working behind her eyes that she didn't show me.

"Okay," she said. "Sunday."

I smiled at her and she smiled back.

In the bedroom later, I retrieved the second phone from my jacket before Elena could find it in the wash. I put it in the inside drawer. I locked it.

I lay beside my wife in the dark and listened to her breathing even toward sleep. I thought about the child that wasn't mine and a man on a dark road who had been somewhere he shouldn't have been.

I needed to know who he was.

I needed to know before anyone else did.

Elena's breathing deepened. She was asleep while I stared at the ceiling.

One week, the message had said.

I could wait one week.