The Child I Carried Secretly

Erika Frederick POV: My breath hitched. The image on my screen, sent by Kandy, pulsed with a malevolent energy. A profound fear, cold and sharp, pierced through me. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that whatever lay hidden beneath that blurred thumbnail would irrevocably change my life. There was no going back, no pretending. This was the precipice, and I was about to fall. Do I really want to see this? A voice inside me screamed, No! Protect yourself! But another, stronger voice, the one that had built an empire, demanded, Face it. Know your enemy. I clenched my jaw. No more hiding. I tapped the image. It was a screenshot of Kandy' s private social media account, a digital shrine to her and Braden' s affair. Each post was a meticulously curated snapshot of their "love," a sickeningly saccharine narrative of stolen moments and whispered promises. Like a thief in the night, I devoured every detail, every photo, every timestamp. My own timeline, my own suffering, played out in stark contrast to their illicit joy. There was the picture of them laughing on a beach, taken the very week I'd been admitted to the hospital for my gastric bleeding, the same week Braden had told me he was "stuck on a business trip." Another showed them hiking in a secluded mountain range, his arm wrapped around her, while I lay in bed, weak with fever, Braden sending me a terse text: "Can't make it home, huge client meeting." Then a photo of them at sunrise, overlooking a breathtaking cityscape, his hand intertwining with hers. I remembered that day vividly. I' d been mercilessly torn apart by a demanding client, working until dawn to salvage a deal, Braden' s only contact a bland email about his "unavoidable delay." My gaze snagged on a specific date, a post marked with a red heart emoji and the caption: "Our little secret ." The date burned into my mind. It was the darkest chapter of my life, a time when I thought I couldn' t possibly endure any more pain. My grandmother. The woman who raised me, my rock, my everything. She had passed away suddenly. Braden had offered his condolences, a rushed phone call filled with static, explaining he was "stranded overseas due to an unexpected travel ban." He sounded distant, distracted, his words hollow. But Kandy' s post, dated the exact same day, told a different story. A photo of Braden, his back to the camera, stepping out of a shower in a luxurious hotel bathroom. His shoulders bore fresh, angry red scratch marks. The caption: "Stuck with my hubby in this cozy hotel. Best 'quarantine' ever! He always knows how to make me feel better ." Hubby. Stuck. I knew how much my grandmother had meant to him, how he' d often called her his "second mother." My tears had poured out in torrents at her funeral, my body shaking with grief, while he, my husband, had been showering, laughing, and intertwining with her, his back crisscrossed with her nails. His hurried, almost annoyed text message, "So sorry for your loss, babe. Wish I could be there. Hang in there." It wasn't because of a travel ban. It was because he was with her. My stomach muscles seized, a violent, wrenching spasm that brought me to my knees. The bile rose in my throat, hot and acrid. I emptied my stomach into the toilet, dry heaving until my body shook with exhaustion. My vision swam. A furious, burning hatred ignited in my chest, consuming everything in its path. Everyone should feel this pain. Everyone.