He Got Engaged During My Labor, So I Chose His Rival novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Upholstery Promise
Janie goes into labor in the stadium parking lot while her husband wins the game and gets engaged to the owner's daughter on the jumbotron. She promises a stranger about his seats, tells him to drive away from the team's hospital, and has her son in a gas-station lot. Then the agent texts that Chase's lawyers will say the baby isn't his on television first.
The whole stadium was screaming my husband's name, and I was in the back of a stranger's car trying not to have a baby.
Chase Holloway had just thrown the winning touchdown.
I knew because the driver's radio said so, and then my phone buzzed with a text from his agent.
Not from Chase.
"Chase has filed for divorce. Papers attached. Sign by midnight and Schedule C pays you fifty thousand dollars."
The second text came right under it.
"The team just announced his engagement to the owner's daughter on the big screen. Please don't make a scene."
I laughed so hard that something in my ribs gave way.
It was a small, wet crack, and it hurt more than the contraction.
Three years married to the highest-paid quarterback in the league, and I had been a clause.
A wife who made a famous man look steady for his sponsors.
Clause 31 of our prenup says neither of us may announce another partner while we are still married.
I had read all sixty-one pages forty times, because nobody ever handed me anything else to read at the games.
His team had just announced one to a full stadium and a national broadcast.
The driver turned around in his seat.
His phone mount said his name was Lyle, and his face said he had seen a lot of people in the back of that car.
"Ma'am, I'm not shifting out of park until you promise me about the upholstery."
"I'm Janie, and I promise."
"Say it with the word in it."
"I promise your upholstery will survive me," I said, and then I held the door handle and made a sound I had never made.
Lyle waited for it to finish.
Then he pulled a roll of paper towels out of the glove box and a clear shower curtain out of the trunk.
He spread the curtain over the seat while I was still sitting on it.
"I drive for the app," he said. "I've met people."
He read the cleaning fee off his phone, a hundred and fifty dollars, billed to the card on my account.
The card on my account was Chase's black card.
Clause 14(b) lets me use it for wife-related emergencies.
"Charge it," I said. "Charge every cent."
It was the first thing I had enjoyed all night.
Lacey McClintock had spent the whole season bringing me ginger tea and a heated blanket in the family box.
When my back started hurting at halftime, she squeezed my arm.
"Stay through the fourth, honey," she'd said. "The cameras love you up here."
So I stayed, and my water broke in the third quarter, right there in the family box.
My phone buzzed again.
It was Lacey.
"Text me the second that baby is here! I mean it, sweetheart."
I looked at that message for the length of one contraction.
It was the only kind message I'd gotten all season, and she had sent it right after getting engaged to my husband.
Lyle put the Corolla in drive.
"Where to? The Stampede hospital's four minutes."
The Stampede owned that hospital.
The Stampede's logo hung over the front desk, and the team's doctors were on the birthing floor, and Chase's name was on the donor wall.
My hospital bag sat at my feet with a man's gray sweatshirt folded on top.
I had worn it every night of the last month.
It belonged to a man in Scottsdale whose last name I never got.
I looked at it, and I looked at my phone with the team tracker open, a little blue dot with my name on it.
So I turned the tracker off, and I told Lyle to drive to the county hospital, forty minutes away.
"Forty minutes?" he said.
"Go the long way," I said. "Anywhere Chase Holloway isn't."
We made it past three red lights.
At the fourth one the baby decided for us.
Lyle swerved into a gas station, put it in park, and said the only words I will ever love him for.
"Not one drop on the seat. Push."
I pushed.
My son came into the world on a shower curtain, furious, with the radio still shouting about the winning drive.
Lyle caught him with both hands and a paper towel.
"That's a Gus," he said.
I wasn't in any position to argue.
Gus screamed, and I held him, and my rib hurt every time I breathed.
The third text arrived while Lyle was wrapping us both in his flannel jacket.
It was from the agent.
"Chase's lawyers have always known that baby isn't his. Chase will say so on television in the morning, before you can."
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