The Billionaire Regretted Losing His Invisible Wife novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Vitamins

At her stepmother's house Willa palms the new vitamins and finds the daily-pill bottle in Rosalind's own cabinet.

Rosalind drove me home from the hospital at one in the morning with the heater turned up to the top.

"You poor thing," she said. "I told Celia she was too sharp with you, but she cried the whole ride to the hospital."

"Celia pushed me," I said.

"Sweetheart, I know that's what it felt like."

She put her hand on mine at the red light.

"Stuart will never forgive you for saying it out loud. Let me smooth things over. You only need to rest."

I looked out the window at the dark road.

I had no one else in the world.

My father had died when I was twenty, and Rosalind had handled everything after that, the house, the lawyers, the bills, even the wedding.

I let her hand stay on mine.

Her house in New Jersey smelled the way it always did, of lemon polish and the dried roses she kept in every room.

She took me up to my old bedroom and turned back the quilt.

"I'll bring you something warm," she said.

I sat on the bed with my coat still on.

For the first time I looked at my own hands.

They were shaking, and the left one was wrapped around my stomach.

Rosalind came back with a tray.

It held chamomile tea, two crackers on a saucer, and a small white pill on a folded napkin.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Your vitamins, darling. They're good for the babies."

I had told her nothing about babies.

"How did you know it was twins?" I asked.

"I read it on your chart at the nurses' desk," she said quickly. "They let family look."

Nobody had been at the desk when she came in. I had watched the door the whole time.

She was still smiling.

"Tomorrow morning I've booked you a private clinic," she said. "A friend of mine. Quiet, no paperwork, nobody from Stuart's world. You'll sign nothing and tell nobody."

"I'd rather see my own doctor."

"Your own doctor is on Stuart's payroll, sweetheart. Think."

I had not known that, and I did not know whether it was true.

She tucked the quilt around my legs the way she had when I was twenty.

"Go on," she said. "Down with it. I want to see you swallow."

I put the pill on my tongue and drank the tea.

I held the pill in my cheek until she kissed my hair and left.

Then I spat it into the napkin and sat with it in my palm.

It was small and white, with two letters pressed into one side and a line across the middle.

I knew that pill.

I had swallowed one every morning for three years.

I went down the hall to Rosalind's bathroom on my bare feet and opened the medicine cabinet.

On the second shelf, between a bottle of aspirin and a jar of hand cream, stood a brown plastic bottle with my name on the label.

*Lothrop, Willa. One tablet daily.*

Under that, in red: *Do not use during pregnancy.*

The pharmacy was in Rosalind's own town.

The date on the label was last Tuesday, and the bottle was almost full.

I had been living in Manhattan for three years.

Rosalind had filled my prescription a week ago, for a daughter who lived two hours away and never came to visit.

I did not know what that meant yet, and I was too frightened to guess.

I shook one into my hand and laid it beside the pill from the tray.

They were the same.

For three years Rosalind had delivered my pills to the penthouse once a month in a white paper bag.

She had called them my vitamins then, too.

She had told me they were Stuart's condition.

I stood in her bathroom light with two identical pills in my hand and tried to make that sentence mean something else.

It did not.

Stuart had never asked me whether I took them.

He had never said the word pill to me in my life.

Rosalind was the only person who had ever mentioned them, and she had mentioned them every month.

A phone buzzed on the tray in the bedroom.

I went back down the hall and picked it up, because it was lit, and because it was her phone.

The message was from Celia.

*Did she swallow it?*

I read it twice.

Below it was another message, sent a minute earlier.

*Make sure she does. Mother, I need her to lose them before Stuart sees a scan.*

My knees stopped holding me up, and I sat down on the floor with the phone in my hand.

Two heartbeats, the doctor had said.

Both strong.

Behind me, in the hallway, a floorboard creaked.

"Willa, darling," Rosalind said from the doorway. "Did you finish your tea?"

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