My Husband Chose His Mistress Over Our Unborn Baby

The little girl on my exam table had a heartbeat like a hummingbird, fast and bright, and I kept my stethoscope pressed there a beat longer than I needed to. It steadied me. It always did.

"Sounds perfect," I told her mother. "Ear infection's almost cleared. One more round of antibiotics."

That was when Delia knocked, opened the door six inches, and slid her head through the gap. "Walk-in. Sports injury. Room three, whenever you're ready."

"Two minutes," I said, and finished my notes, and drew a small sun in the corner of the chart because the girl had told me she liked sunny days.

I didn't think about room three again until I was standing in front of it.

I opened the door already smiling the smile I use for strangers — warm, brief, professional — and the smile stayed on my face for exactly one second after I saw who was sitting in the chair.

Stefan.

Seven years older. Gray at the temples now, which he never had before. Same jaw, same way of sitting like the room belonged to him. My hand was still on the doorknob and for one full heartbeat it would not move.

Then it did.

"Mrs. — Dr. Mitchell," he said, catching himself, and something in his voice cracked open on my name like he'd been saving it.

I didn't answer him. I looked at the boy on the exam table instead — tall now, jaw sharp with a nineteen-year-old's anger, cradling his wrist against his chest like it owed him something. Kingston Castro. I would have known him anywhere. I had seen that face in my sleep for years, at the top of a staircase, half a second before the world tilted.

"Let me see it," I said to him, and my voice came out flat and clean, a voice I have built with great care.

He held out his wrist without looking at me. It was swollen, a little discolored. I pressed along the bones, watched his face for the wince.

"Basketball," he muttered. "I fell wrong."

"When?"

"This morning."

"Does it hurt more when I do this?" I rotated it slightly. He hissed.

"That's a yes," I said, and reached for the wrap. "It's a sprain, not a break, but I want an X-ray to be sure. I'll send you down the hall."

"Wren." Stefan again, leaning forward. "The clinic's beautiful. You built all this yourself?"

I taped the wrap in place. I did not look up.

"Keep it elevated tonight," I told Kingston. "Ice, twenty minutes on, twenty off. Ibuprofen for the swelling."

"You look well," Stefan tried again, softer now, like a man testing ice with one foot. "Really well."

I finished the chart. I wrote *guardian present* in the space for accompanying adult, because that was the only word for him I was willing to put on paper.

"Delia will get you the X-ray order," I said, and handed her the folder as I passed her in the doorway, and I did not turn around, not once, not even when I heard him say my name a third time like it was a question he still expected me to answer.

---

That night I called Raegan from my kitchen floor, back against the cabinets, phone on speaker beside me.

"He found me," I said.

Two seconds of silence. Then: "Tell me everything. Then tell me what you need."

So I told her. The chair he sat in. The gray at his temples. Kingston's wrist, the sprain, the X-ray order. I told it like a chart note — time, findings, treatment — because that was the only way I could get through it without my hands shaking.

"I'm coming over," Raegan said when I finished.

"No. I'm fine. I'm going to bed."

"I'm coming over," she said again, and hung up before I could argue, and forty minutes later she was on my couch with a bottle of wine she didn't open and her hand on my knee, saying nothing at all, which was exactly what I needed and hadn't known how to ask for.

---

I was at the gym before the sun came up, the way I always am. Three mornings a week, five years running, not one broken. The heavy bag doesn't ask questions. It just takes what you give it.

I threw a jab, a cross, a hook. Again. Again. Somewhere around the eighth round I noticed my breathing had changed — not ragged, not out of control, just *managed*, the way I manage everything now, like a patient monitoring her own vitals. Controlled is not the same as calm. I know the difference. I teach it to myself every morning.

I added an extra round.

Afterward, in the shower, I let the water run hot until my skin went pink, and then I dressed, and pinned my father's badge inside my bag where it always rides, cool metal against the lining, and I opened the clinic at eight sharp.

Eleven patients that day. Two ear infections, a fever, a fractured pinky from a trampoline, a well-check that ran long because the baby wouldn't stop laughing at my stethoscope. I did not think about Stefan once.

That's what I told myself, walking to my car at six, the sky already going gray-blue with early dusk. I did not think about him once.

I believed it for almost the whole drive home.