My best friend since college. The woman who stood beside me at my wedding, fingers laced with mine as we waited for music to swell. The woman I had held three months earlier as she cried into my sweater, terrified and alone, pregnant and abandoned.
The road tilted. I drifted into the slow lane without meaning to, my heart slamming so hard it felt visible, like it might punch through my ribs and announce itself to the world.
“Relax,” Richard said, his voice smooth now, confident in a way I had not heard in years. “Laura has no idea. She lives in that bubble her father built for her. She thinks I’m killing myself at work, building our future. I’m just waiting. Counting days.”
I tasted metal. My breath came shallow, quick, like the air had thinned inside the car.
“I’m tired of waiting,” Monica said, her voice slipping into something petulant. I could see her without trying. The careful hair, the soft maternity clothes I had bought her last week, the hand always resting on her belly. “I’m six months along. I can’t keep hiding under these sweaters. It’s humiliating pretending this baby belongs to some guy who disappeared.”
“Just hold on,” Richard replied, colder now, each word placed with intention. “Next month. Her father’s trust distribution clears. Five million dollars. Once it hits, I move it offshore, file the paperwork, and we’re gone. New life. Clean slate.”
My vision blurred. Rain streaked down the windshield, bending the city into something unrecognizable.
“We’ll take the baby,” he continued. “And leave her with that big empty house and her dried-up womb.”
The words landed like a physical blow.
My hands went numb. The steering wheel felt foreign, slick under my palms.
He knew. He had always known. Every appointment. Every injection. Every silent drive home after another failed attempt. The miscarriages I had named in my head and buried in my body. The way I carried that grief like a private shame, convinced my inability had hollowed me out.
Dried-up womb.
“She’s too old to give me a son anyway,” Richard went on, almost conversational. “She’s barren. You’re not. You’re giving me what she never could. A legacy. An heir.”
A sound filled the car then, tinny but unmistakable.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Amplified. Steady.
Monica laughed softly. “Hear that? That’s your son’s heartbeat. Strong. Perfect. Everything hers never was.”
I jerked the wheel slightly, tires skidding just enough to earn an angry horn from a passing truck. I pulled onto the shoulder, hazard lights flashing, my body shaking so violently I had to press my head back against the seat.
They were at a doctor’s appointment.
The one Monica had cried about yesterday. The one she had begged off attending alone because she was scared. The one I had offered to go to with her. The one I had given her two hundred dollars for because she said she could not afford the copay.
I heard them kiss. Soft. Intimate. The sound of mouths that knew each other well. Richard had not touched me like that in over a year. Stress, he had said. Pressure. Exhaustion.
“I love you,” he whispered to her, tenderness threading through his voice like a blade.
“We just have to keep pretending,” he added. “Let her pay for everything. The birth. The nursery. Let her think she’s going to be the doting aunt. And then we vanish. Her money funds the whole thing.”
“What if she fights?” Monica asked.
“She won’t,” Richard said, smug. “I’ve been documenting her. The work hours. The mood swings. Her obsession with trying to get pregnant. My lawyer says we can make her look unstable. Between that and the prenup, she’ll be lucky to keep the house.”
I stared at the rain-smeared glass, at my own reflection layered faintly over the city. The call timer crept past four minutes.
Then the line went dead.
The silence that followed felt enormous. Rain drummed on the roof, heavy and relentless. I sat there, hazard lights blinking, as the life I recognized folded in on itself.
