His Secret Wife Walked Away Pregnant novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Glovebox
Joanna finds a ring, a card and three photos meant for another woman, and follows her husband to see her face.
I found the ring in my husband's glovebox, with a positive pregnancy test sitting in my purse.
It was not my ring.
Gavin had sent me down to the garage for his phone charger.
"Glovebox," he'd said from the stove, not even looking up. "Hurry, babe. Dinner's almost done."
Under the charger there was a small velvet box.
Inside it was a large diamond, and a card in his handwriting.
"V, you waited long enough. Tomorrow, in front of everyone."
Under the box there were three photographs.
All three were taken at his family's Christmas gala, in a ballroom I knew from magazines.
Gold chandeliers, a twelve-foot tree, a tower of champagne glasses.
In every photo the same blonde woman stood next to my husband.
Her hand lay flat on his chest, and his hand held her waist.
It was not a polite hand.
Three Christmases, three photos, and I had spent all three on our couch alone.
On the back of the newest one, in pink ink, she had written: "Three Christmases down. The ring comes next. Yours, V."
I took pictures of everything with my phone.
Then I put it all back exactly as I'd found it and rode the elevator up to the penthouse.
The apartment smelled like garlic and butter.
Gavin stood at the stove in a black sweater with his sleeves pushed up.
He gave me the slow, crooked smile I used to think was only mine.
"Took you long enough."
"The charger was buried," I said.
I sounded calm, and I have no idea how.
He had made shrimp scampi, my favorite.
I had planned to tell him about the baby tonight, and I had bought a tiny pair of white socks to put on my plate.
They were in my purse now, and they felt like they were burning through the leather.
I put down my fork.
"Tomorrow is your grandmother's eightieth birthday," I said. "The New Year's Eve gala."
His jaw tightened, just barely.
"Still no room for me?"
"Joanna." He used the soft voice he saved for arguments. "We've been over this. You know how she is."
He took my hand across the table and ran his thumb in a slow circle on the inside of my wrist.
He always did that when he wanted me to stop asking.
It used to make my pulse jump.
Tonight it made me want to be sick.
"One night," he said. "I'll be home by noon."
I'd heard that exact promise three years in a row.
"Okay," I said, and pulled my hand back. "Let's eat."
His phone sat face-up on the counter while he showered.
It lit up with one new message from a contact named "V."
I didn't know his passcode, but the preview was enough.
"Tomorrow I say yes where everyone can see. Don't keep me waiting, fiancé."
He had a fiancée.
The shower shut off, and I was holding his phone when he came out in a towel.
"Why are you touching my phone?"
"It kept buzzing," I said. "I thought it was work."
The screen had already gone dark.
He took it and checked it, and then he looked at me for a second longer than he needed to.
Then his shoulders came down. "Thanks, babe."
In the bedroom he pulled me onto the bed and put his mouth against my neck.
"It's been a while," he murmured. "Come here."
A week ago I would have gone to him.
Now all I could see was her hand on his chest.
I stood up. "I'm tired."
He frowned, puzzled more than hurt.
I poured myself a glass of water and kept my back to him.
"Hypothetically," I said. "If a woman walked into your grandmother's gala and said she was your wife. What would happen?"
"Security would drag her out." No pause at all. "Grandmother would destroy her. Lawyers, press, she'd never work in this city again."
He softened his voice.
"That's why you can't come, Joanna. I'm protecting you."
Protecting me.
The water shook in the glass.
"I'll sleep in the guest room," I said. "I have a headache."
He didn't try to stop me, and that hurt more than anything he had said.
I lay awake and thought about the first Christmas.
I'd baked gingerbread and packed it in a red tin with a card to his grandmother, signed "from a friend of Gavin's."
He brought the tin back two days later, unopened.
"She doesn't accept gifts from strangers," he said.
I apologized to him.
He had told me one more thing that year, laughing.
His grandmother sets one extra chair at every Christmas dinner, he'd said, and nobody ever explains it.
"Tradition. Don't read into it."
At six in the morning I heard the shower, then the expensive cologne he only wore when something mattered.
He didn't knock on my door.
The front door closed.
I was in the garage in three minutes, in my old Toyota, the car he called practical.
I followed his Bentley onto Park Avenue.
He didn't turn toward the Hargrove house.
He drove south, toward the river, and stopped in front of a glass tower with a doorman in white gloves.
A minute later she came out.
Blonde hair, white coat, sunglasses in December.
She didn't wait for him to open the door.
Through the windshield, fifty feet away, I watched my husband take her face in both hands and kiss her.
It was not a quick kiss.
He kissed her slowly, with no hurry and no fear of being seen.
I put both hands on my stomach and waited to cry.
Nothing came.
"Your daddy," I whispered, "is kissing someone else."
Then I started the engine and followed them.
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