My Husband Chose His Ex Over Our Baby

The test sat on the edge of the sink for three minutes. I counted them on my phone, sitting on the cold tile floor of the guest bathroom because my legs didn't want to hold me up anymore.

It was six in the morning. The penthouse was silent in that specific way it only got before the city woke up — no traffic yet, no elevator chime, no sound of Priscilla's door. Just me and the tile and the small plastic stick with its two blue lines.

Positive.

I didn't move. I sat there with my back against the tub and the test balanced on my knee, and I waited for the fear to come. It didn't. Not at first. What came instead was something so fragile I almost didn't recognize it — hope. Stupid, irrational hope, blooming in my chest like it had never once been disappointed before.

A baby. Gael's baby.

I thought about the way his face might change when I told him. I let myself imagine it — his hand pausing over whatever contract he was reading, his eyes lifting to mine, something in them finally, finally soft. I knew better. Seven years should have taught me better. But hope doesn't care what you know. It just moves through you anyway, quiet and warm, and for a few minutes on that bathroom floor, I let it.

Then I got up, wrapped the test in a tissue, and buried it at the bottom of the trash can under the tissue box.

It took me four days to find the courage to say it out loud.

I told myself I was waiting for the right moment. The truth was simpler — I was scared. Scared of how he'd look at me when I said it. Scared of what it would mean if hope, once spoken aloud, came back to me empty-handed.

Priscilla left Thursday evening for a dinner with her old London friends, some designer passing through the city. Gael stayed home. I heard him in his study around eight, the door half open, lamplight spilling into the hall. I stood outside for a full minute before I made myself knock.

He was at his desk, a contract spread in front of him, pen in hand. He didn't look up. "What."

"Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"I'm reviewing the Kessler deal." He made a small mark on the page. "Quick."

I stepped further into the room. My hands were cold. I pressed them together in front of me like that might steady something.

"I went to the doctor this week," I said. "There's something I need to tell you."

He didn't stop writing. "Okay."

"I'm—" I took a breath. "I'm pregnant."

The pen stopped.

For one second — less than a second — I thought I saw something shift in his face. A flicker. I held onto it the way you hold onto the last warm second before you step into cold water.

Then his jaw tightened, and the flicker was gone, replaced by something flat and closed.

"Whose is it?"

The question didn't land right away. It sat in the air between us, strange and wrong, like a sentence in a language I almost understood.

"What?"

"Whoever it is." He set the pen down and finally looked at me, and his eyes were tired, impatient, already moving toward the next thing on his list. "That's not something I can help you with, Elliot. I don't know what you want me to say."

"Gael—"

"Just handle it." He said it the way he said everything now — clipped, final, a door closing before I'd even finished opening mine. He was already standing, already reaching for his phone on the desk, the screen lighting his face pale blue. "Whatever you need. A doctor, a clinic, money — handle it quietly. I don't need this showing up anywhere."

I stood very still. "You think it's someone else's."

He wasn't listening anymore. His thumb moved across the screen. A text had come in — I could see the shape of it even upside down, even from across the room, the little preview bubble with her name at the top. *Priscilla.* Something about a reservation, a table for two, a car at nine.

"I have to go," he said, not to me exactly. To the room. To the air. "Priscilla's stuck without a car."

He walked past me. His shoulder nearly brushed mine in the doorway, and for a second I thought he might stop, might turn around, might ask the one question that would have changed everything — *is it mine.* He didn't. He didn't even slow down.

The front door closed behind him a few minutes later. I heard the elevator hum to life, carrying him down and away, toward her.

I stood in the study a long time, in the lamplight, with my hand pressed flat against my stomach, and I thought about the two blue lines waiting under the tissues in the trash, and I thought about how quiet the apartment was, and how quiet I would have to learn to be about this too.

Handle it, he'd said.

Okay, I thought. I will.