My Husband Defended the Woman Who Replaced Me

The tea tray was warm against my palms, and the baby kicked once, low and soft, like a small fist knocking from the inside.

"Easy," I whispered, one hand drifting to the curve under my sweater. "I'm going. I'm going."

The Burke house was too big for the sound of one person climbing stairs. Marble underfoot, a chandelier overhead that Sylas's mother had picked out a decade before I ever set foot in this place. I'd lived here three years. It still didn't feel like mine. Nothing in it did.

Ophelia had left an hour ago. I could still smell her perfume on the banister — that sharp white-floral thing she wore like a flag planted in enemy territory. She always touched the railing on her way out. Always. As if to remind me whose house this used to be.

Ayden had been crying behind his door since she'd gone. Not the loud kind. The quiet, theatrical kind, just loud enough to travel.

So here I was. Chamomile. Honey. The little ginger cookies he pretended he didn't like. Six months pregnant and climbing toward a fourteen-year-old boy who had spent the morning telling his mother, through the open door, that I was "that woman."

I didn't blame him. I kept telling myself that. He was a child. Ophelia had filled his head the way you fill a glass — slowly, deliberately, until it spilled.

My back ached. The tray was heavier than it should have been. I shifted it to balance the weight off my hip, and the baby kicked again, harder this time, like a question.

*I know,* I thought. *I know, sweetheart. One more flight.*

I reached the landing.

Ayden's door swung open before I could knock.

He came out fast — too fast — and for a half-second I thought he was running to me, the way he used to when he was small enough to forget he was supposed to hate me. I started to smile. I started to say his name.

Then his hands hit my chest.

It wasn't a slap. It wasn't a flail. It was a push — two flat palms, shoulder height, with his whole body behind them. The kind of push you plant your feet for.

The tray went first. I heard the china before I felt the fall — that high bright shatter, porcelain breaking against marble in a sound like a bell. Then the world tilted, and I was weightless, and my hands were reaching for nothing, and the only thought in my head was *not the baby not the baby not the baby—*

I hit the third step with my hip. The seventh with my shoulder. Somewhere in between, I bit my tongue, and the taste of copper bloomed in my mouth like a warning I had heard too late.

I stopped at the bottom.

The ceiling was very far away. The chandelier swung — no, it didn't, I was the one swinging, my vision rocking like a