I felt my face burn. Not because I had done anything wrong, but because humiliation is not logical. It crawls into your skin when strangers witness your pain and you cannot immediately control the room.
“What is her name?” I asked.
Jack swallowed.
The woman answered for him.
“Lauren Brooks.”
She said it like an introduction at a party. Like she had been waiting to say it to me.
I looked at her belly. Then at Jack’s hand still holding hers.
“How far along?” I asked.
Lauren smiled.
“Thirty-two weeks.”
Thirty-two.
The number moved through me slowly. Thirty-two weeks meant this had not been one mistake on one drunk night. This had lived beside my pregnancy almost from the beginning. While I was vomiting into our bathroom sink, he had been with her. While I cried at the first ultrasound, he had known there might be another one. While I folded onesies at our kitchen table, he had built a second future somewhere else.
Jack pulled his hand away from Lauren’s then, but it was too late. The gesture only made him look guilty and weak.
“Emily, please,” he said, stepping toward me.
Lauren grabbed his sleeve.
“No. You’re not leaving me like this. You promised.”
Promised.
The word sliced clean through me.
A contraction of pain tightened low across my abdomen. At first, I thought it was emotional. My body reacting to shock. I pressed a hand under my belly and inhaled carefully.
“Did you promise her?” I asked Jack.
His silence was answer enough.
Lauren raised her voice toward the reception desk.
“Can someone help me? I’m having contractions, and I don’t need stress right now. The father of my baby is here, and his wife is causing a scene.”
His wife.
Not his pregnant wife. Not the woman he had betrayed. Just his wife, an obstacle in a corridor.
A nurse moved forward, professional and uncertain. “Ma’am, let’s get you checked in.”
