Chapter 2

He walked in still holding his phone.

He didn't look at the bag by the door. He didn't look at me.

He looked at the screen.

"Take the comment down."

"No."

His jaw flexed. "Half my board follows her. Do you understand what you just did?"

I actually laughed.

"So other people read it. Good."

"You humiliated a woman who has held this house together for four years."

"Held it together how, Julian?"

He finally lifted his eyes, and there it was — the tired, disappointed look he'd perfected. The one that said I was an acquisition that had underperformed.

He noticed I was wearing his old overcoat. He noticed nothing else.

"You've lost weight," he said. "Good. Celeste said the cravings were getting embarrassing."

Something in me went very still.

"You want to sit at home and be pregnant at my expense? Fine. I've paid for that."

"But not every woman needs to be managed like you do."

He set his keys down. Straightened his cuff.

"And if you keep going after Celeste," he added, calm as weather, "think about who pays for Theo's placement."

There it was. The leash. My brother. He reached for it so easily he didn't even know his hand had moved.

I unzipped the bag right there on the marble.

"Luxury," I said. "Come look."

Six onesies. A blanket from a discount rack. A knit hat. A carpenter pencil.

"That's the hospital bag. Do you know why it's still packed?"

He didn't answer. He didn't know it was a question.

"I have to ask permission to buy a crib. To book an ultrasound. To call my own husband."

I pointed at the phone on the console.

"Your assistant has your cell. Your driver has your cell. Your barber has your cell. Your wife has an extension."

"When I call at three in the morning, a woman you pay decides whether I'm real."

Julian looked genuinely confused.

Then he said it — the sentence I'll hear at my own funeral:

"This is about a phone line?"

"You torched a woman's reputation because you're jealous of a phone extension?"

If he had ever, once, believed that was humiliating, he would never have let it exist.

"Believe what you want," I said.

I set the petition on the console.

"I'm filing. We're done."

He laughed. Genuinely — like I'd finally landed the punchline.

"Enough. I don't have time for theater."

He smoothed his sleeve, generous as a king.

"Tomorrow you get your own card. No limit. I'll move the nursery up. Hire a night nurse."

Then, the gift:

"And I'll be there for the birth. Front row. I'll clear the whole week."

The room tilted.

He didn't know.

He was standing six feet from me, offering to attend the birth of a daughter I'd buried that morning, and he didn't know.

I could have told him. Watched his face.

But I understood something in that second, cold and complete:

If he had to be told, he didn't deserve to know.

"Do whatever you want," I said.

That stopped him.

He'd never heard those words from me. Not once in four years.

He didn't know what to do with a threat that didn't work.

So he stood there while I picked up the bag and walked out.

I heard him breathe in like he was going to say my name.

He didn't.

Later — much later — Marcus told me why.

Celeste had already prepped him that afternoon.

"She's thirty-four weeks and hormonal, Julian. I've seen it a hundred times. Don't chase her. Give her a week and she'll come home crying."

So he let me go.

Marcus said that after the door shut, Julian found something in his coat pocket. A tiny knit sock I'd tucked there in August, because he kept asking if the baby was "real yet."

He rolled it in his fingers and said, to an empty house:

"She'll be back before the baby comes."

"And I'll be a good husband about it."

He believed it.

He told his executive team I was "resting." He told his mother I was "hormonal."

For six weeks he didn't call. Not because he was cruel — because he was certain.

And in six weeks he never once opened the hospital portal.

If he had, he'd have seen the first line of my file.

DELIVERED. STILLBORN. 5:52 A.M.

Three days before he texted me that a crib wasn't an emergency.