Chapter 2 – What Was Under the Blanket

There was no man’s cologne on the sheets. No second pillow dented by another head. No lace, no lipstick, no evidence of the affair Julian had spent two sleepless nights rehearsing in his mind.

There was a thin white monitoring belt strapped around Elena’s swollen stomach, three wired sensor pads pressed against her skin, and a portable fetal monitor no bigger than a paperback book, its small screen blinking a soft green light. Beside her pillow, half-hidden under a second blanket she’d shoved there in panic, sat a folder thick with printed lab results, an ultrasound envelope, and a business card for a Manhattan maternal-fetal medicine practice Julian had never heard of.

He stood frozen, the duvet still balled in his fist, his fury draining out of him so fast it left him lightheaded.

“Elena.” His voice had lost its edge entirely. “What is this?”

She didn’t answer right away. She was crying now, silently, the kind of crying that comes from someone who has been holding a single breath for far too long and has finally been allowed to let it go.

“Placental complication,” she finally said. “Dr. Webb found it six weeks ago. If I’m not monitored properly, if I go into labor without warning, I could lose the baby. I could lose more than the baby.”

Julian’s knees found the edge of the mattress before he decided to sit. “Six weeks. You’ve known for six weeks and you said nothing?”

“I tried to tell Dr. Reyes.” Her voice cracked on the name. “Your mother’s doctor. The one she insisted I switch to the week we found out I was pregnant. He looked at my chart for four minutes and told me I was being an anxious first-time mother. He told me the same thing three separate times, Julian, while the numbers on my labs kept getting worse.”

“So you found someone else.”

“I found someone else at two in the morning, because that was the only time Dr. Webb could see me without your mother’s staff noticing the car in the driveway. I made him park at the side gate. I told him not to use his real name with the guards.” She finally looked up at him, and what was in her eyes wasn’t guilt. It was exhaustion, and something colder underneath it. “That’s the man in Victoria’s photograph, Julian. That’s who you’ve spent two days convinced was destroying our marriage.”