Divorced, Now Watch Me Rise novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sunday Dinner
At Vera's table Imogen announces her pregnancy; Dalton calls it another man's, hits her in front of the family and throws her out. She leaves with one suitcase and sees the news already says he filed.
I told them about the baby over the lamb, in front of my husband's mother and two members of his board.
I hadn't planned to.
I had planned to tell my husband alone that night, with the positive test in my hand.
But Sunday dinner at the family house was never private.
His mother sat at the head of the table in her pearls, and she noticed everything.
"You haven't touched your wine, Imogen," Vera said.
"She's been pale all week," said the woman across from me.
Her name was Lydia, she worked for my husband, and she had been kind to me for two years.
She leaned over and refilled my water glass herself.
"Sit still, I've got it. You're not eating either, and she's right about the wine."
She had turned down the wine too, and she kept a roll of ginger candies in her cardigan pocket.
I thought nothing of it.
I put down my fork, because my hands had started to shake.
"I wasn't going to say it here," I said. "But I'm nine weeks pregnant."
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then the older board member laughed and lifted his glass.
"Well! Harlan always said a Reeve who turns his back on his own child is no Reeve."
The younger man laughed with him.
Dalton didn't.
Neither did Vera, who looked at her plate.
I looked at my husband.
We had been married four years, and I had never once seen him smile at me the way I was smiling at him now.
Four years ago his father had forgiven my father's loan in exchange for me, and I had come to this house with one suitcase.
Dalton set down his knife.
"Whose?" he said.
I thought I had heard him wrong.
"What?"
He reached inside his jacket and took out a thick envelope.
He slid it across the white tablecloth, and photographs spilled out against my water glass.
Me at a café table with a man beside me.
Me in the passenger seat of a dark car at night.
In both of them the man had his hand on my back, and he was Brogan Buckley, Dalton's stepbrother.
"Dalton, I met Brogan at our wedding," I said. "I've seen him three times in four years."
"You've seen him more than that."
"I have never been in that car."
"My mother wanted to spare you this at the table," he said. "I told her you'd lie to her face."
Vera lifted her napkin and dabbed her mouth.
She had known.
She had known before I sat down.
"Take a test," I said. "Take any test you want. This baby is yours."
"That child is not mine."
He turned to the two board members.
"Gentlemen, you heard me say it. It is not mine."
The older man had stopped smiling.
The younger one was looking at his phone.
I stood up so fast my chair scraped back.
"Dalton, look at me."
He stood too.
He hit me across the face with his open hand, hard enough to turn my head.
My water glass went over.
Lydia gasped and put both hands over her mouth.
Nobody else moved.
Nobody came around the table to me.
I tasted blood where my teeth had cut my cheek.
Vera set her napkin beside her plate.
"Your father's debt was paid the day you signed," she said. "You came to this house with one suitcase, Imogen."
"Take the same one," Vera said, and went back to her lamb.
I looked at the board members, and the older one looked at his hands.
I looked at Lydia, who was crying.
I looked at the man I had slept next to for four years.
He picked up his wine and drank.
So I turned around and walked upstairs.
I packed the old suitcase with the clothes I'd arrived in, my mother's brush and the test.
I left the jewelry box on the dresser, and I kept the ring on my finger because it was the only thing I could sell.
No one stopped me on the stairs.
At the iron gate I stood in the dark with the suitcase at my feet and opened a car app.
DECLINED, the screen said.
I tried again, and it said the same thing.
My bank app wouldn't open.
Then my phone buzzed, and a news alert slid down over it.
It was nine-fourteen at night.
REEVE HOLDINGS CEO FILES FOR DIVORCE, CITES AFFAIR WITH STEPBROTHER.
There was a photo under the headline.
It was the one of me in the car.
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