After His Mistress Faked a Pregnancy, He Tried to Drown Me

I practiced what I would say the whole drive home.

I'd been doing that for three days — playing it out in my head like a movie. I would walk through the front door. Damien would be in the kitchen, or on the couch, or standing at the window the way he sometimes did, watching the Seattle skyline like it owed him something. I would come up behind him. I would say his name. He would turn around, and I would hold out the velvet box, and his face — that face I had memorized in seventeen different kinds of light — would do something it hadn't done in a long time.

It would soften.

Three years of marriage. Two years of treatments before that, of cold clinic rooms and blood draws and the specific loneliness of hope that keeps failing. Doctors who said things like "challenging" and "unlikely" in careful voices. Me, nodding and scheduling the next appointment, then driving home alone and sitting in the parking garage for ten minutes before I trusted myself to walk through the door without Damien seeing it on my face.

I hadn't told him about most of it. I didn't want to burden him. I told myself that was love.

The test was in a small velvet box I'd bought from a jewelry store on Fifth — deep burgundy, the kind that closes with a soft click. Inside: the test, and a pair of baby booties I'd found at a market stall, impossibly small, cream-colored with a yellow duck on each toe. I'd held them in the store for a full minute before I could make myself buy them. My hands were shaking.

They were still shaking now, in the elevator up to our penthouse floor.

I pressed the velvet box against my chest and breathed. New Year's Eve. The city was already celebrating somewhere below us — I could feel it more than hear it, a low pulse in the building's bones. I thought: this is the best night. I thought: he's going to be so happy. I thought: everything that has been hard is going to mean something now.

The elevator opened.

Our door was unlocked. I noticed that and filed it away without thinking about it.

The penthouse was dark except for the bedroom light — a warm strip of gold under the closed door at the end of the hall. The city glittered through the floor-to-ceiling windows, indifferent and gorgeous. I set my bag down quietly. I wanted to surprise him.

I heard his voice first.

Low. A sound I recognized but had no context for, not at that distance, not at that hour. I stopped walking. The velvet box was in both my hands.

Then another sound. Softer. Not his.

I opened the bedroom door.

I don't remember deciding to. My hand just moved.

Damien was in our bed. Our bed — the one with the gray linen headboard I'd chosen, the one where I slept on