My Fiancé Killed Our Babies for His Mistress

The sound that woke me wasn't pain. It was a shutter. Click. Click. Click. Small and mechanical, like a beetle tapping glass.

I opened my eyes to a white ceiling and a white light and, standing at the window with her arms crossed, Mrs. Bell in a cream Chanel suit that made her look like she'd come from a luncheon instead of a hospital. Beside her stood a woman I didn't recognize, holding a phone up at an angle. Recording.

"There she is," Mrs. Bell said, like she was introducing a specimen.

I tried to sit up. Pain tore through my abdomen, low and vicious, and I gasped, and the woman with the phone shifted closer to catch it.

"Get that out of my room," I said. My voice cracked in the middle, useless.

"This is Priya," Mrs. Bell said, as if I'd asked politely for an introduction. "She writes for a very popular column. I thought, given the circumstances, the public deserves clarity."

"What circumstances."

Mrs. Bell's smile didn't move, but something behind her eyes sharpened. "Nine times, Mazie. Nine. And now this. Some women simply aren't built to carry a Bell heir. It's not your fault, of course." A pause, timed like a stage direction. "Well. It's a little your fault. You knew what this family needed and you let my son believe you could give it to him anyway."

The camera light blinked red. I stared at it instead of her.

"You'll apologize," Mrs. Bell went on, pleasant as a woman ordering brunch. "On camera, now, for trapping my son in an engagement you were never equipped to honor. Or your mother's coverage lapses at the Bell Memorial ICU by end of business today. I've already spoken to billing. It's remarkably easy to lose a bed when the family stops paying for it."

The monitor beside me beeped in steady rhythm, indifferent. I thought of my mother two floors up, tubes taped to her wrist, the ventilator breathing for her because her body had forgotten how.

"Say it," Mrs. Bell said, softer now, almost kind, which was worse. "It costs you nothing you haven't already given away."

I looked at the camera. Blood had soaked through the gauze at my hip; I could feel the warmth of it against the sheet. My hands were shaking, and I let them shake, because I didn't have the strength left to hide it.

"I'm sorry," I said, word for word, the way she'd scripted it in her head long before I ever opened my eyes. "I'm sorry for trapping Tristan in something I couldn't give him."

Priya lowered the phone. Mrs. Bell smiled like a woman who'd just closed a deal, patted my blanketed foot on her way out, and left a silence behind her thick enough to choke on.

I made myself a promise on that bed, bleeding, staring at the ceiling. That was the last time. The very last time I would ever beg anyone for anything.

—

I found Tristan that evening in the corridor outside my room, leaning against the wall, tie loosened, phone glowing in his hand. I stopped a few feet from him. My legs still didn't want to hold me all the way, but I stood anyway.

"Have you ever loved me?" I asked. "At all. Even once."

He didn't look up right away. When he did, his eyes moved over me the way you look at a hallway you've walked a thousand times — nothing there worth seeing twice.

"Why are you asking me this now." Not a question. A complaint.

"Because I want to know."

He exhaled through his nose, checked his phone again. "You're being dramatic. It's been a long day."

That was all. No anger, no defense, no lie dressed up as tenderness. Just irritation, thin and bored, like I was a meeting that had run long.

I understood then that I couldn't even make him angry anymore. I turned and walked back into my room, and behind me I heard the small, unbothered click of his phone unlocking again.

—

Leighton came after the lights had dimmed for the night shift. She didn't knock. She slid into the chair beside my bed, reached out, and smoothed a strand of hair off my forehead with two fingers, gentle as a mother in a movie about mothers.

"You look so pale," she murmured. "Poor thing."

I didn't answer. I watched her the way you watch a snake that hasn't decided yet whether to strike.

"You know," she said, studying her own nails, "I never thought we'd get this far. I really didn't." A small laugh, private, like she was remembering an old joke. "Ten. That's got to be some kind of record. He owes me a trip to Capri now. That was the number we landed on. Ten."

"What are you talking about."

But she was already rising, already smoothing her skirt, already halfway to the door with her heels whispering against the tile. "Get some rest," she said over her shoulder, and then she was gone, and the door clicked shut behind her like a period at the end of a sentence I hadn't finished reading.

I lay in the dark a long time after that. I thought of the kitchen floor, Tristan's hands around mine. *This one stays, I swear it on my life.* I thought of eight other promises just like it, and the way each one had died in exactly the same clinic, on exactly the same table, under exactly the same water-stained ceiling tile shaped like a fist.

A number. A trip to Capri. A score.

None of it, I understood now, staring at the dark, had ever been an accident.