Redesigning His Regret After She Left

Celina didn't sleep. She sat on the living room sofa all night, the city lights outside the window blurring into meaningless streaks. She kept checking her phone, and Blake's text glowed in the darkness, like a warning.

At two in the morning, she heard the faint click of the lock.

Blake stepped into the foyer, shrugging off his tailored suit jacket and tossing it onto a chair. As he moved past her, a scent drifted from him. It wasn't his usual clean, crisp cologne.

It was a soft, floral fragrance. Gardenias.

The smell coiled in her stomach, a sickening, foreign presence in their home. It made her heart ache with a physical pain.

He caught sight of her in the darkness, her face washed white by the light of her mobile screen, and he came to a halt. He frowned. "Why are you still up?"

Celina took a deep breath. The scent lingered in the air, and it irritated her. She tried to tell him that she had been waiting for him to return, to ask him who that woman was, to tell him she was pregnant, and to make him apologize for how he had let her down as a husband. But when she caught that unfamiliar scent of perfume, all the questions in her heart turned into silent mockery. There was no point in asking them; it would only humiliate herself.

Finally, she didn't answer Blake. She just watched him, searching his handsome, tired face for a crack, a sign of guilt, anything.

He sighed, misinterpreting her silence. He reached down, his hand intending to help her up, to guide her to bed.

The moment his fingers brushed her arm, a jolt went through her. It was like being touched by a stranger. She flinched away, a small, involuntary gasp escaping her lips.

"Don't touch me," she whispered, the words barely audible.

Blake's hand froze in mid-air. His expression hardened, and the flicker of worry disappeared, giving way to that cold, familiar look. He sat up straighter, lowering his voice a little.

"I'm exhausted. I'm not going to deal with your moods. As for the thing I said we need to talk about, we'll discuss it tomorrow morning."

He turned and walked into the master bedroom without another word.

Celina followed him, her feet moving as if in a dream. He was unbuttoning his shirt, preparing for a shower, acting as if she wasn't even there.

That night, the king-sized bed felt like a vast, frozen tundra. An invisible wall of ice stretched between them.

The next morning, she woke to the sharp glare of sunlight. The space beside her was empty.

She found him in the dining room, dressed in a casual cashmere sweater, calmly sipping his coffee as he scrolled through something on his tablet. Maria set a plate of fruit and toast in front of her, but the food tasted bland and flavorless.

The silence was heavy, suffocating.

Blake set his coffee cup down. The sharp clink of ceramic on stone echoed in the quiet room.

He reached into the leather briefcase beside his chair and pulled out a sheaf of papers bound in a neat blue cover. He slid it across the polished marble table toward her.

Her eyes fell on the bold words at the top of the page.

DIVORCE AGREEMENT.

For a second, all sound vanished. There was only a loud, roaring hum in her ears. That was the sound of blood rushing to her ears from shock and anger.

"Sign it," Blake said. His voice was perfectly level, as if he were discussing a quarterly report.

Her fingers were numb, cold. She forced herself to look up, to meet his eyes. "Why?"

He looked away, his gaze fixed on the skyline outside the window. "Celina, this was never anything more than a family arrangement. You've always known that. I appreciate what your father did, donating his liver to save my grandfather. But love was never there for me. If my grandfather hadn't been so determined to match us, we wouldn't even be here. Now he's old, and we have been married for three years, I believe this arrangement has reached its end."

The "end". That single word pierced her. She carried a new "beginning" within her, a child of them. She wanted to scream. She wanted to ask about the woman who answered his phone, about the gardenia perfume. She wanted to tell him about the tiny, pulsing life inside her.

But the words died in her throat, replaced by a bitter, self-mocking laugh that she quickly swallowed.

She knew, with a sudden, chilling clarity, that the baby wouldn't be a bridge connecting their love. It would be a complication he wanted to be rid of. A liability.

Her hand moved, instinctively, to cover her stomach. She disguised the motion by reaching for her water glass. The secret was hers now. Hers to protect.

"The terms are generous," he continued, his tone that of a CEO outlining a severance package. "You keep everything you brought into the marriage, plus any personal gifts. You can stay in the apartment until you find a suitable place."

Every word was a precise, clean cut. He had planned this. Calculated everything.

She picked up the document. The weight of the paper felt immense in her trembling hands.

She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She just looked at him, the last spark of hope in her eyes finally flickering out.

She flipped to the last page. His signature was already there, a bold, decisive slash of ink. The date was yesterday's. He didn't even give her any room to negotiate.

The sight of that signature sent a wave of nausea through her stomach. The feeling of retching clung to her throat, but she suppressed it.

Blake caught the ashen cast of her face. A frown creased his brow. "Are you all right?"